Erskine Bowles’ latest radio ad features a cancer survivor giving a lively denunciation of Richard Burr’s voting record concerning breast cancer research funds. The logic of the ad is that Richard Burr received $238,338 in campaign donations from the pharmaceutical industry, therefore he voted against federal breast cancer research, therefore he’s in the pocket of “special interests”.

Time for a little quiz?

Question 1: How small a population is necessary to qualify as a “special interest”? For example, are there more research oncologists looking for federal grant money than pharmaceutical employees working in North Carolina? How big is the population of breast cancer patients in our state? Would they be too numerous to fit the definition?

(For that matter, how can the Bowles campaign see a supposed vote against research as a payback benefit to drug companies? I don’t get it.)

Question 2: If Erskine Bowles received $109,050 in donations from the textile industry, and if his wife is the CEO of a $2.2 billion textile corporation, then isn’t Bowles’ statement that China “is without question our number one problem” and his call to “extend indefinitely existing quotas on Chinese textile imports” (item one in A Jobs Plan for North Carolina) also playing to special interests?

Question 3: In fact, if pharmaceutical companies only represent 14% of Burr’s support from the business community, but textiles are 84% of Bowles’ contributions from business, what should we make of it? Now who’s special?

The way I see it, we’re all special, it just depends on your definition. This ad and the one released just before it, playing a similar theme, are just so much hair splitting and special pleading (no pun intended), and I wonder if an intelligent man like Mr. Bowles doesn’t cringe a little bit whenever he hears it. The question for the voter is not whether one candidate or the other has a connection, familial, financial, political, or whatever, but does or would it turn his judgement away from fulfilling his responsibilities as our elected official.