Thursday, May 15, 2008

Making Mountains out of Molehills

Pardon the poor pun, but it seems much of Colorado media today has been fixated on making a mountain out of a molehill:
The Republican U.S. Senate candidate on Wednesday unveiled his first television ad, with the theme "Colorado is my life."

"I proposed to my wife, Maureen, on top of Pikes Peak," [Bob] Schaffer says in the ad, gesturing behind him as the couple's picture appears with a snow-covered mountain in the background.

The mountain pictured in the ad, though, isn't Pikes Peak; it's Mount McKinley in Alaska.

The Colorado Democratic Party and Progress-NowAction, a liberal advocacy group, were quick to jump on the mistake, sending news releases noting that apparently all mountains look alike to Ohio natives like Schaffer.

Both news releases ridiculing Schaffer misspelled Pikes Peak as "Pike's Peak."
Okay. Mistakes happen. The Democrats and the Lefty attack groups know it's not likely that candidate Schaffer himself carefully scrutinized the final ad to observe the mistake. Of course, the mistake was quickly caught and corrected. And as long as the Republican candidate can laugh it off, the other side gets a one-day story out of it at best.

Fine. But isn't it also interesting that both the Colorado Democratic Party and ProgressNowAction made the same spelling error in their press releases? Is this evidence that the two groups coordinated their political attacks? Or is this evidence that both of them simply need a remedial course in grammar for state landmarks?

We can make mountains out of molehills, too.