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Share ThisMar 06, 2008
The Chicago Tribune Editorial - Meet the Wadsworths
Rob Wadsworth is a firefighter. His wife, Amanda, works as an office assistant. They live in Yorkville and get by OK on $73,000 a year. They have a mop-headed little boy and a cute little girl. Take a look at their photo here. Aren't they just adorable?
Well, life's not all rosy for the Wadsworths. Rob likes to hit the tavern with his buddies after work, so Amanda basically has two jobs because someone has to ride herd on the kids -- one's a chronic shoplifter, the other likes to play with matches and neither of them can recite the alphabet without prompting -- and Rob says he'd come home if Amanda's hag of a mother wasn't there all the time ...
Actually, we made up that last part ... but who cares? Jim Oberweis made up the Wadsworths!
He also made up Juan and Maria Garcia, a construction worker and a bank teller from Aurora who have three kids and haul in $54,778 a year. And DeKalb office manager Sheila Johnson, a divorced mother of two who makes $47,333. And Juan and Elena Marcos, who have a precious little baby boy and live on his $68,044 salary.
They're all pictured in a mailer for Oberweis' campaign for Congress in the 14th District.
"We can't afford Bill Foster's tax hikes!!" says the headline on Oberweis' glossy flier, which was sent to voters in advance of Saturday's special election.
If Bill Foster gets his way, the Wadsworths will pay an extra $8,905 a year!
Total fiction. All of it. These people don't exist. They were created by Oberweis' campaign, which bought stock photos to use in the ad.
They're nice-looking folks, although they're sporting awfully big smiles given that they could be slapped with Foster's huge tax increases.
Oh, wait, these families don't exist. They're fake.
The flier cops to this trickery in itty bitty print at the bottom. "The four examples above are fictional, and any similarity between these characters and any real people is pure coincidence," it reads.
Pure coincidence? Makes us think any similarity between the Oberweis campaign and the truth is pure coincidence.
He's done this kind of thing before. In 2006, he ran a TV ad that used fake headlines from several newspapers to trash his Republican opponent for governor, Judy Baar Topinka. The ad had the Tribune masthead above a headline that said: "Investigation into Topinka." The Tribune didn't run that headline or those words.
This page endorsed Bill Foster earlier this week. One reason for that decision: Oberweis has shown in four campaigns that he plays fast and loose with the truth.
By the way, using Oberweis' calculations, the Wadsworths must be paying $34,250 in taxes on their $73,000 income. And that's before the $8,905 increase.
They really need a new tax accountant.
Oh, that's right. They're not real.
