After Mother Jones ran a cover story about Republican New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez portraying her as "petty" and "weak on policy," Martinez fired back at the magazine.
She emailed her supporters, saying "one of the most radically liberal publications in the country” was “peddling false, personal attacks against me, using stolen audiotapes from our debate prep sessions four years ago."
There’s little chance that Susana Martinez will be able to avoid critiques from liberal pundits these days, since she is considered one of the up-and-coming members of the Republican Party and a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2016.
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Here is what four liberal pundits have to say about Martinez:
1. Salon political writer Katie McDonough criticized Martinez’s veto of a bill that would have raised New Mexico’s minimum wage from $7.50 to 8.50. Martinez had said she wanted to raise the minimum wage by 30 cents instead of a dollar.
McDonough also mocked the idea of Martinez being one of the “young guns” of the GOP.
“The hype around Martinez is following the same script that managed to convince the country that (Chris) Christie is a ‘moderate,’ ” McDonough wrote.
“The ‘young guns’ are more of the same: an army of women who are beating the drum against reproductive rights, fighting equal pay in the states, and pulling moves from the same tired playbook.”
2. Martinez has taken heat from environmentalists, and some liberal pundits say that her environmental policies are shaped by cronyism in the oil industry.
“Since Gov. Martinez was elected in 2010 she has repealed every major environmental regulation in the state. She rolled back climate change mitigation plans because it hurt industry,”
wrote activist and professor David Correia in the online magazine La Jicarita, which advocates for environmental protections.
“The right to freely pollute groundwater will outlive us all and will only be surpassed by the persistence of toxic contamination in our soil and groundwater. This will be Susana Martinez’s legacy, and we’ll have to live (and die) with it,” Correia wrote.
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3. Political pundit Alex Burns of Politico called Martinez “the first post-Obama Republican, an up-and-comer who has thrived in a heavily diverse, liberal-leaning state, dodging the most explosive national debates of the day and concentrating on a narrow agenda of issues where the center-right has politically popular ideas.”
4. America’s Voice, an organization focused on policy change for immigrants, chided Martinez for referring to “undocumented” workers as “illegal” and for her insistence that these immigrants should not be allowed to get drivers’ licenses.
In 2012, America’s Voice named Martinez one of “the most anti-immigrant Republicans” scheduled to speak that year at the Republican National Convention.
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