Anti-choice 'Electoral Hit List' Targets Twelve Democrats

The notoriously über-conservative Colorado congresswoman lost her Nov. 2008 reelection bid after years of running relentlessly negative campaigns focused on banning abortion, sex education and gay marriage.

After dropping out of sight for several months — and oddly refusing to thank her own campaign volunteers  or concede to Democratic opponent Betsy Markey — Musgrave resurfaced in March with a plum job at the national antiabortion political advocacy group, the Susan B. Anthony List, to run opposition campaigns against pro-choice lawmakers.

Just six months into the "Votes Have Consequences" project, Musgrave has issued her first call-to-arms for the group's most fervent anti-choice supporters with an electoral hit list of 12 congressional Democrats.

The lawmakers on Musgrave's 2010 hot seat: Sens. Michael Bennett (CO), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Harry Reid (NV), and Reps. Alan Grayson (FL-08), Debbie Halvorson (IL-11), Frank Kratovil (MD-01), Suzanne Kosmas( FL-24), Walt Minnick (ID-01), Glenn Nye (VA-02), Tom Perriello (VA-05), Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01), and Harry Teague (NM-02).

Curiously, several of lawmakers on the list, like Reid, Lincoln and Minnick, are hardly reliable champions of protecting comprehensive reproductive health care with voting records scoring at or well below 50 percent on choice issues. All the representatives, with the exception of Shea-Porter, are freshman legislators in districts formerly held by Republicans. So Musgrave isn't exactly going out on a limb.

While the VHC campaign is reportedly flush with a $2 million budget to run in-district skirmishes, place automated phone calls, hold rallies and unleash an onslaught of press releases to local media, it's Musgrave's own patented brand of scorched Earth campaign tactics that demands real attention.

For the uninitiated, Musgrave, a three-term congresswoman from eastern Colorado, has been criticized for "childish, petulant and mean-spirited campaigning" and engaging in "a series of smear tactics and mud-slinging" by outraged members of her own party.

She's also been called the Sarah Palin of the Plains. And remains a close friend of her ideological twin in the House, Minn. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

So what do those on the VHC list have to look forward to in the coming election season?

For one, a women unafraid of controversy. As Matt Taibbi notes in a Rolling Stone story on the Musgrave-Markey match up last year, "[Musgrave's] first political gig was on the school board in Fort Morgan, where she devoted her energies to blacking out — literally blacking out — passages in sex-education textbooks."

After winning election to Congress in 2002, following a tumultuous career in the Colorado statehouse, she introduced the federal Defense of Marriage Act to ban same sex unions and declared at the 2006 Values Voters Summit that preventing gay marriage was "the most important issue we face today."

Musgrave also won't hesitate to throw a political punch and no blow appears to be low enough. In 2004, a campaign flyer digitally modified the eyes of her democratic opponent — Japanese-American state Senate President Stan Matsunaka — to appear narrower and more slanted in a ham-handed attempt to make him appear sneaky.  Another series of flyers, dubbed by local political watchers as "the Elephant Man," so distorted Matsunaka's face that he appeared to be grossly deformed.

Again locked in a tight race, her campaign supporters were believed to be behind a 2006 push poll scheme that told Latinos they were prohibited from voting and would be arrested for immigration violations. Unsigned letters to registered voters with Hispanic surnames also circulated in her district advising people to show up at the polls the day after the election.

In her last go-around, Musgrave falsely insinuated in a television ad that her democratic opponent Markey could face five years in prison for steering no-bid government contracts to her family business while working as a staffer for Sen. Ken Salazar. The Markey campaign filed a complaint against Musgrave for deceptive advertising but it was rebuffed by the local fair election commission, as was Musgrave's counter complaint against a Markey-aired ad.

Colorado voters finally drew the line and rejected Musgrave's politics of personal destruction. Markey defeated her resoundingly in a district that hasn't elected a democrat since the early 1970s.

Though that lesson appears to have been short lived for the Pentacostal mother of four.

In a May 2009 VHC fundraising letter, Musgrave employs the most vicious dog-whistle political tactics, a strategy of using coded language that reveals a very specific subtext of meaning to certain audiences. A frequently used dog-whistle in the abortion debate is the landmark Dred Scott decision to equate Roe v. Wade with racism and slaves' lack of personhood.

In the letter that she breezily closes with "I will never forget your friendship — not ever,"  Musgrave blames "the radical homosexual lobby, abortionists, gun-grabbers and all the rest of the extremists" for her electoral defeat and promises to expose "liberal politicians who talk like conservatives at home and vote like Barney Frank." Musgrave promises to "confront the Left directly and continue to stand strong to protect our families, our values and our country" now that she's thrown off the shackles of Washington politics and the Republican party.

VHC launched its first attack during the two-week congressional summer recess with a television ad criticizing Senate President Reid over long-discredited claims that the health care reform bills will repeal the onerous Hyde Amendment that prohibits federal funds from covering abortion services.

None of the VHC-targeted lawmakers contacted for this story returned requests for comment.