ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The campaign manager for Democrat Tom Udall had only a couple of words for the candidate’s opponent in New Mexico’s hotly contested U.S. Senate race: “Wrong guy.”
Udall’s campaign said Wednesday it wanted to set the record straight after seeing a letter that Republican Rep. Steve Pearce sent to the head of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, criticizing Udall for taking action to cut off access to the nation’s untapped domestic energy supplies.
Pearce, who recently won the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, pointed to language that was included in a spending measure that would have prevented the Bureau of Land Management from completing regulation to allow oil shale leases.
The problem, according to Udall’s campaign, is that the New Mexico congressman wasn’t responsible for that language. It was his cousin, Democrat Mark Udall of Colorado, campaign spokeswoman Marissa Padilla said.
“They were making an attack on a supposed Tom Udall position today and they were wrong,” Padilla said of the Pearce campaign.
Heather Fox, a spokeswoman for Mark Udall, confirmed that the measure was the Colorado congressman’s.
She said it originally was an amendment to last year’s Interior appropriations bill, and that Colorado Democratic Reps. Udall and John Salazar, as well as Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, asked the chairman of the Appropriation Committee’s Interior subcommittee to include the same language for fiscal 2009.
The amendment states its purpose is “to prohibit use of funds in the bill to prepare or publish final regulations regarding a commercial leasing program for oil shale resources on public lands or to conduct an oil shale lease sale.”
Pearce’s camp said the letter naming Tom Udall was based on a report last week by Inside EPA, a publication that tracks environmental and energy news. The report identified the New Mexico congressman as the one behind the language.
Inside EPA issued a correction Thursday after Udall’s campaign requested one, but Pearce spokesman Brian Phillips said the issue of who was responsible for the language is secondary to the debate over the nation’s energy supplies.
“Tom Udall has a long record of opposing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opposing exploration on the outer continental shelf, opposing extraction of our oil shale to go after our 2 trillion barrels of oil that we could get here in this country,” Phillips said. “We could be the Saudi Arabia of oil shale if it were not for the Tom Udalls of the world.”
Phillips said energy is a top issue this election year and Tom Udall needs to explain to New Mexico voters “why he supports policies that support $4 a gallon gas.”
Udall’s campaign argued that the congressman is not against drilling in all places.
“It’s a matter of responsible drilling and responsible energy policy and we cannot drill our way out of this current energy situation,” Padilla said.
Padilla added that she can understand why Pearce’s campaign is trying to shift attention from the Udall mix-up, but she said campaigns have a responsibility to check facts before making claims about political opponents.
Phillips said he has yet to see a correction to the report that named Tom Udall and that Pearce will continue to challenge Udall’s stance on domestic energy exploration.
“If it just so happens that this time it was someone else and not him, fine,” Phillips said. “But we have a number of other votes and legislation that he supported that show that he did not support drilling and exploring for our own domestic resources.”
Pearce on Thursday introduced legislation aimed at increasing domestic oil production by removing moratoriums on exploration on the outer continental shelf and allowing energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A portion of royalties from such leasing would go to set up Alternative Energy Trust Fund to fund investments and renewable energy.
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