How Harry Reid Carpet-Bombed the South

[DonViejo]

Eleanor Clift

Call it the Romney strategy: The Senate Majority PAC’s early wave of attack ads has been paying off in the polls in Democrats’ closest races.

When the latest round of polls in key states showed vulnerable Democratic senators holding their own and the GOP’s dream candidate, Rep. Tom Cotton, an Iraq veteran and Harvard grad, down 10 points in his race against Arkansas Senator David Pryor, Republicans blamed the Senate Majority PAC as the chief culprit in shifting the landscape and upending the numbers.

Formed in 2011 and staffed by former aides to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, it has been spending heavily and early in races that will determine which party controls the Senate after November, and of course whether Reid keeps his job as leader.

Spending early to define the opposing candidate in negative terms is known as the Romney strategy. It’s what the Obama campaign did in 2012 with a flood of money before Romney even secured the nomination, successfully defining him over the airwaves as a rich and uncaring corporatist.

You could say freshman Rep. Cotton is the Romney in this cycle. A Senate Majority PAC ad launched in March says, “Corporate special interests are spending millions to smear Mark Pryor and elect Tom Cotton. Why? Before Congress, Cotton got paid handsomely working for insurance companies,” says the narrator. The Washington Post fact-checker awarded the ad four Pinocchios for stretching the truth, noting that Cotton did not work directly for an insurance company. He was employed by the global consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, and lists insurance among the industries he assisted on his Facebook page.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/18/how-harry-reid-carpet-bombed-the-south.html

[PumpkinAle]

1. The trouble is too many Americans

have too short an attention gap and if it isn't in their faces then and there they have forgotten about it.