As Madrid Slams Wilson on Iraq Intelligence ...

This is a guest post from Avelino Maestas of Live From Silver City, a blog that's providing excellent coverage of the political scene and more in the Gila region. It's cross-posted at his blog, and adds some compelling points to our recent discussions about the NM-01 Madrid-Wilson race.

This is a little outside the region, but there are two issues regarding the Madrid-Wilson race that I wanted to mention.

The first has been talked about in several places, including up north at Democracy for New Mexico and FBIHOP. The nuts and bolts of it: Wilson is below 50% in a poll released by Madrid earlier this week. Furthermore, she only leads Madrid by two points, 46-44, and we’ve seen nothing from the GOP to refute those numbers. We can go to Josh Marshall on why this is significant:

Of late, we’ve been seeing lots of (D) partisan polls. And that’s, as I said, because the Dems are the ones who have an interest in showing how close a lot of these races are.

The point I didn’t mention is this: the normal response when one candidate puts out a poll favorable to him or herself is for the other side to go into the field and (if they can) and get a better number to release. And back in July they did just that. According to Roll Call, the NRCC dropped $450,000 to conduct polls in 28 competitive districts. The article was dated July 31st. And the polls were conducted “over a two-week period this month.” In other words, the polling was almost certainly done at least a month ago.

So far as I can tell, I’ve seen few if any of those polls. And it’s not hard to figure out why.

Madrid’s latest ad is so powerful because it not only ties Wilson to Bush and his unpopular venture in Iraq, it faults her for rubber-stamping the administration’s intelligence that led to the 2003 invasion.

That leads to my second point: this tidbit from Laura Rozen (guest-blogging over at the Washington Monthly) about a new House Intelligence Committee report (PDF) on Iran:

It’s a sloppy report, as the NYT, Sick, Yglesias and others point out. But its purpose wasn’t just to take a quick swipe at marshalling the facts in its favor. It’s a campaign document, a “brochure”, as the NYT put it. What kind of joke of a committee is the House Intel committee that it has lent itself to that? Is anyone in Congress doing any serious work on the Iran issue? Or by the way, on the Iraq issue?

And which of New Mexico’s representatives to the House sits on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence? You get one guess.