Did Indiana Republicans vote for challenger Richard Mourdock or against incumbent Richard Lugar in their primary election for a U.S. Senate seat?It’s hard to tell, because voters don’t have to give a reason.Under President Obama, the nation is a downhill roller coaster, a derailing train and a fiery car crash, according to a TV ad released by the Republican National Committee.
“Left turn after left turn, America is headed the wrong way fast,” the narrator says while reciting a litany of bad news on Obama’s watch: 2 million jobs lost, 6 million mortgage foreclosures, $14 trillion in debt, $500 billion in higher taxes.
“Don’t let Obama drive us to disaster; change direction.”
The ad will be shown on national cable channels in select states, including Indiana, over the next month. GOP officials in Indiana and elsewhere defined it as a “light buy” without providing details.
Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-3rd, was among those promoting the ad campaign Thursday. In a conference call with reporters, Stutzman called Obama’s agenda “a failure from the stimulus package to the higher taxes of Obamacare, and the list goes on and on.”
He said Republicans are “talking about jobs, the economy, getting people back to work, giving people a paycheck, an opportunity, rather than a bigger government, a government that is going to continue to consume from the taxpayer rather than letting the consumer be the driving force of our economy.”
Brad Woodhouse, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, said in a written statement that Republicans “are trying to mislead voters about the state of the economy. While the president continues to fight to clean up an economic mess that was years in the making, Republicans would rather run negative ads than offer positive ideas.”
Stutzman in May was critical of a YouTube video from The Agenda Project that depicted Republican proposals for overhauling Medicare as a man in a suit and tie pushing an elderly woman out of a wheelchair and over a cliff.
“These tactics are the politics of fear,” Stutzman wrote on his campaign website at the time. “How can any decent person use the image of a man hurling an elderly woman over a cliff as a means to support his political views.”
The Republicans’ TV ad shows no faces or bodies of people aboard the crashing train and cars, only the hands of the driver of a speeding car that apparently flies off a dock and ends up in a large body of water.
Pundits seem sure that most Hoosier voters will back the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 after Obama carried the state in 2008. Does showing the “change direction” ad in Indiana indicate the GOP isn’t confident that will be the case?
“We are confident Hoosiers will not be fooled again as in 2008,” said Pete Seat, the Indiana GOP communications director. But, he added, “We will not take anything for granted.”
GOP officials in a dozen states, including Ohio and Michigan, have conducted similar conference calls this week to discuss the ad campaign with media.
