HARD TO SWALLOW …

Under the most charitable interpretation, state Democrats merely made a mistake when they rushed a television ad onto the air just after the Senate failed to pass a last-minute Medicare prescription drug measure. In the ad, the Democrats accused Republican Sen. Susan Collins of siding with drug companies with her vote in support of the bill, called Graham-Smith.

Several problems were immediately apparent. Sen. Collins had voted along with the large majority of Democrats on the bill, so the state Dems were attacking their own party. And those national Democrats took pains to point out that the senators who were voting “no” were actually siding with some of the drug companies, which Democratic leaders claim urged them to vote against the bill. The state Democrats then found themselves on the side of those drug companies, which was not exactly the kind of positioning they were expecting.

So maybe it was all just an error for a party in a hurry. But no such excuse would explain a similar error by AFL-CIO officials, who Thursday began airing an ad that says, wrongly, “Collins supported a plan favored by the pharmaceutical companies.” This appears more than a week after the press examined the issue, identified the mistake in the first ad and quoted drug-lobby Phrma spokesman Jeff Trewitt saying the companies “had not taken a position on any one Medicare bill in the Congress.” So why aren’t Democrats who feel bound by Senate candidate Chellie Pingree’s signature on the Maine Code of Election Ethics urging that the ad be yanked off the air?

When it comes to health care coverage, Sen. Collins and former state Sen. Pingree agree far more often than they disagree. Yet the Pingree campaign strategy has been to look for specific instances where they differ and try to exploit the differences. The problem has come when Democrats have made those differences something they aren’t, so many people saw an unhappy nurse on a Democratic ad recently that asserts Sen. Collins “gutted” the Patients’ Bill of Rights. The ad was referring to an amendment Sen. Collins wrote that allowed states to keep their versions of a patients’ bill of rights as long as the state laws were “consistent with” the federal law as certified by the U.S. secretary of health and human services. The National Conference of State Legislatures, which includes Maine, supported the amendment, saying, “States are best situated to provide oversight and enforcement of the patient and provider protection established in the legislation.” Sen. Collins also voted against taking money from Medicare and customs-service funding to pay for the bill, especially because the Senate Finance Committee had not had a chance to consider it. And she supported amendments to shield private businesses from being sued because of something their insurance company did or did not do.

The reason she voted this way was easy enough to see at the time. A report by The Lewin Group, fortuitously commissioned for the AFL-CIO, estimated that for every 1 percent increase in premiums, 300,000 people would lose their insurance, so holding costs down was paramount to keeping private businesses from passing on these costs or simply ending their health-coverage benefit. There’s nothing wrong with Democrats arguing that more expansive protections were worth the risk of increasing the number of people without insurance at all, but to argue, as Sen. Collins did, that ensuring coverage for more people should take precedence is hardly gutting the bill.

The Collins campaign and state Republicans can and should responsibly answer these charges. But should they have to? Why should Maine voters be forced to sort through misleading accusations that hide behind a political campaign? The public deserves a smarter race than what it is being handed by these ads.