As GOP Moneybomb Switches To Smaller Races, PA Gets To See What A Bunch Of Corny Dicks Tom Smith And David Freed Are
A curious thing is happening in politics right now — and by right now, we mean the last 72 hours or so. GOP Super PACs are pulling money out of the Romney campaign and pumping up smaller, downticket races. Why? Because the numbers are bad for Romney, no matter which way you slice them. Take a look at the non-partisan site RealClearPolitics’ comprehensive compilation of polling data (bookmark that link, by the way, it’s essential to any case of Election Fever); Romney’s fate looks even worse if you’re doing this from an Electoral College angle. (And if you truly wanna geek out, check out Nate Silver’s tidal theory of swing states.)
And as those Super PACs get tired of doing damage control and begin to throw more money into races they think they can win, the true filth of all of this can now be seen at home. Take the race between Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General candidate Kathleen Kane and her Republican opponent, Cumberland County District Attorney David Freed. Because of the creepy-beyond-creepy ad above — which intimates in the most un-subtle of ways that if you vote for Kane, your daughter will be more likely to be raped (WHAT IS IT WITH THESE GOP GUYS AND RAPE?) — what should have been a relatively sleepy local ticket is now a national story. And while it’s important to note that the ad was not paid for by Freed himself, neither he nor the Republican State Leadership Committee have disavowed themselves of the ad, and despite promises that they’d edit some blatantly wrong non-facts stated in the ad, it’s still on TV in its original form — and perhaps in even heavier rotation as the money begins to really flow.
Over in the PA Senate race, the GOP’s Tom Smith for Senate campaign has not yet gotten around to hinting that incumbent Dem Tom Casey will bugger your dog and steal your wife, but he’s still playing a robust version of the TV fart game, stinking up local airwaves from here clean on over to the other side of the state. Smith is running a whole slew of ads like the one you see above, each one a study in the kind of hackneyed political advertising that says nothing, really, other than the person paying for this is a dick with no real ideas to hawk, just money and a free-and-easy relationship with “facts.” Casey currently has a 6-to-10 point lead, which we’d like to attribute at least partly to aesthetics. And Kane is currently doing better with fundraising than her opponent. But then, the PA GOP moneybomb has not yet fully detonated.
