MYERS: Keeping the lines straight

Last week the U.S. campaign of Republican Joe Heck sent out a news release that accused his opponent, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, of lying.

Since she began campaigning, Cortez Masto has been saying that as state attorney general, she started “a Mortgage Fraud Strike Force to investigate foreclosure-related fraud and securing nearly $2 billion for [Nevada] homeowners as part of the national mortgage settlement.” One of her ads shows her husband saying, “Catherine took on the big banks when they preyed on homeowners and forced them to pay $1.9 billion to Nevadans.”

The Reno Gazette-Journal ran a story by its terrific fact-checker Mark Robison that concluded Cortez Masto was exaggerating her role, that Nevada merely signed onto a national lawsuit settlement negotiated by other state attorneys general.

Robison quoted Masto herself saying in two different interviews that her role in creating the settlement was limited – “And keep in mind, when this settlement came to Nevada, for a lack of a better word, the cake was already baked. I mean all the terms were already set into it.” “I was not part of the year-long negotiation.”

On the strength of that Robison article, Heck sent out a release headlined, “Reno Gazette-Journal catches Catherine Cortez Masto in billion-dollar lie.”

This is the way it starts.

The Robison piece deals principally with how the lawsuit settlement came to be in the first place. Cortez Masto’s claim deals with how she used the settlement once she signed Nevada onto it.

She has been quite honest in saying that she didn’t negotiate the settlement, but that she created a Strike Force to make sure Nevada foreclosure victims got what they could from it.

Robison gives Cortez Masto a grade of three out of 10 for truthfulness. I disagree. I think he, like Heck, confused the two issues. But that isn’t really the point.

Nowhere does Robison call Cortez Masto a liar. Heck abandons all of Robison’s nuance, using use that poisonous term to deal with a subjective matter that can be seen several ways.

Here is some context I think Robison left out:

Attorneys general of states like Nevada have virtually no negotiating power against insurance companies, the tobacco industry, financial institutions and others with great predatory power.

In the past, for example, Nevada has often dealt with insurers perfectly willing to pull out of the small Nevada market if they don’t get what they want from the legislature or regulators.

So state attorneys general must wait for AGs from larger states to negotiate settlements and then sign onto them. Nevada, for instance, was relatively late in joining the national tobacco settlement.

But small state AGs have some latitude. First, they can decide whether to sign on at all. (Half a dozen states have never joined the tobacco settlement.) And they can decide how to implement the settlement.

No one forced Cortez Masto to piggyback on the national foreclosure effort. It meant her small staff would be strained well beyond its capacity. She chose to take it on.

And she did something that no one in this dispute, including Heck and Robison, have mentioned.

She didn’t just create a Strike Force to implement the lawsuit settlement. On Dec. 6, 2011, she enhanced Nevada’s ability to call Bank of America and other rogue financial powers to account by getting California’s attorney general to agree to a JOINT Strike Force effort. BOA might ignore Nevada, but ignoring California would be risky, indeed.

But the real issue here is Heck’s behavior. He accused Masto of something to which she had, on her own, conceded. She never took credit for negotiating the settlement.

He called her a liar, and then invoked Robison’s article to justify it.

All this is happening very early in the campaign. If this is the tone Heck is employing now, what will he be saying by November?

Heck is a decent guy. When he served in the Nevada Senate, he was widely admired on both sides of the aisle for his temperate nature and ability to work with Democrats.

In this campaign, all I hear is people asking what has happened to him. Few Republicans want a primary in which two Sharron Angles are running.

Heck is squandering a lot of good will.

Dennis Myers is an award-winning journalist who has reported on Nevada’s capital, government and politics for several decades. He has also served as Nevada’s chief deputy secretary of state.