Brad Sherman has three cute daughters; will he get your vote?

Wait, why was Brad Sherman’s mother photoshopped out of a picture sent to non-Jewish voters?

Get your combs ready, because the story about why Lane Sherman, mother of the eight-term Democrat from Sherman Oaks, appeared in a photo sent to Jewish voters in the 30th district but not in the other version of the photo sent to non-Jewish voters, is about to provoke some renewed head-scratching.

Last week, we (and many others) reported that the Sherman campaign had sent out two different mailers with slightly different pictures of the Congressman and his family. And when Sherman spokesman John Schwada told a blogger for The Hill on May 17 that Sherman’s mother was photoshopped out of the “wider mailer” because the photo was “awkwardly composed,” the explanation seemed plausible.

But Sherman, who is running for reelection in the 30th District against Rep. Howard Berman (D - Van Nuys), recently gave a different explanation: the whole thing was one big ploy to get the Sherman family portrait into the Jewish Journal.

The post continues after the jump.

Here’s what Sherman said, as best as I can make it out:

“We were almost desperate to try to get the press to publish pictures of my family. We sent them every kind of picture, they didn’t publish any. Then for a while we scraped around to buy an ad in the Jewish Journal, because if people see my family they’re gonna vote for me, no matter whether they see just my daughters, or my wife and my daughters, any version of that. And so we came up with a clever idea: We’ll publish the same picture in two different versions and so they’ll think they caught something and then they’ll publish, and the only way to cover the story is to publish the picture in both versions, and by God, we now have, without us paying for it, copies of pictures of myself and my family in the Jewish Journal and we hope in other publications as well. And we’ll be sending them to you so you can put them up on the air. “

For the record: I’ve talked a lot over the past 10 months with members of Sherman’s campaign staff and I’ve received countless emails from them. None included a photograph of the candidate’s family, though.