NY Times Caucus: Pennsylvania Republican Apologizes for Anti-Obama E-mail

NY Times Caucus

Pennsylvania Republican Apologizes for Anti-Obama E-mail

An author of the e-mail we told you about last week that the Pennsylvania G.O.P. sent to Jewish voters, equating a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of those Jews who “ignored the warning signs in the 1930’s and 1940’s,” has apologized for it.

Former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Judge Sandra Schultz Newman, a member of John McCain’s national task-force monitoring Election Day voting, who initially stood by the letter when we contacted her about it on Friday, said Monday that she had not read the final draft before it was released.

“Some of the language was inappropriate and intemperate,” Ms. Newman wrote in an e-mail statement Monday. “I apologize to anyone who was offended by this misguided e-mail.”

The e-mail had also falsely asserted that Senator Obama had taught workers at ACORN how to “commit voter registration fraud.”

State GOP officials disavowed the e-mail on Friday night, saying they could not support that assertion as well as another in which the e-mail reported that the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers believed Al Qaeda didn’t do enough on September 11. The letter was twisting a quote Mr. Ayers gave to The New York Times, published on September 11 – before the attacks – speaking about his groups’ bombing campaign in the 1970’s, which resulted in several deaths include those of three police officers.