Case One: Bob Dold. Republican candidate for the north suburban Chicago House seat; he had won election four years ago, and was defeated by Democrat Brad Schneider two years ago. Now he’s trying to get his seat back.
Conventional wisdom for that district is that it’s voters are Republican, but very liberal on social issues, so Dold’s campaign commercials have been emphasizing that he’s pro-gay-marriage and abortion-rights.
But the Democrats have decided that the best way to wage their campaign is by painting him as a Tea Party Republican. He isn’t, but that doesn’t stop them.
Case in point:
Case Two: Bruce Rauner.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single positive ad touting Pat Quinn’s successful tenure as governor. Instead, he’s running one extreme anti-Rauner ad after the next.
Here in Illinois, several years ago, the Democrats raised the income tax rate “temporarily.” Not surprisingly, they’ve now decided that it is vital to the well-being of Illinois residents to make this tax permanent. Rauner, not surprisingly, has said that he won’t extend this rate, so for a while Quinn ran an ad on the radio with an announcer telling listeners that Rauner was going to cut school funding by some intolerable percentage, laying off massive numbers of teachers, in order to “give himself a tax cut.”
Now he’s gone even further. Rauner, among his other business transactions, owned a chain of nursing homes for a time, which were later found to have neglected patients. The connection between Rauner and these cases is tenuous at best, but that hasn’t stopped Quinn from running an ad with a husband of a patient whose death is attributed to nursing home neglect (the veracity of which I can’t comment on), with the message that Rauner is a grandma-killer. I can’t seem to find this on You Tube, but you get the picture.
Ick.
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