Going Negative On Jerry McNerney

The NRCC was busy again yesterday. They reported spending more of Mark Foley’s money in CA-11, with $8,771 for polling and $20,805 for their eleventh McNerney hit piece. Total NRCC spending in Richard Pombo's district to date, $479,839. And the DCCC? I suppose you have to give them credit for consistency. Still zero.

Maybe you’re asking yourself at this point what the NRCC is up to with all this anti-McNerney propaganda. Well, it turns out this is part of a national strategy. The WaPo featured the NRCC and their negative campaign plan in this story last month:

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

The hope is that a vigorous effort to "define" opponents, in the parlance of GOP operatives, can help Republicans shift the midterm debate away from Iraq and limit losses this fall. […]

"Opposition research is power," said Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (N.Y.), the NRCC chairman. "Opposition research is the key to defining untested opponents."

So after dispatching “a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information” on Jerry McNerney, what has the NRCC come up with? Scott Chacon has been posting all the mailed campaign literature in CA-11. Here’s the latest — wow. It’s a whopper.


So there you have it. Jerry McNerney has only voted in 16 of the last 26 elections. The NRCC had half a dozen people snooping around for months on end, and that's all they could come up with? All I can say is, geez, guys, you really should have talked to me first. I have way better opposition research than that.

First, at one point in the campaign, I saw Jerry McNerney pull up to a candidate event in a car that was a little dusty. Now, you know, when the voters of CA-11 elect a Congressman and provide him with a leased $39,285 luxury Lincoln at a cost to the taxpayers of over $7,000 a year — well, they want to know that he’s going to have that baby at the carwash twice a week. So here’s the tagline I envision: “If you can't even trust McNerney to keep his car perfectly clean, how can you ever trust him in Congress?”

Then, of course, there’s the time I saw McNerney trip and stumble. You can all imagine how that one would work: “If McNerney stumbles when he trips, how is he going to be able to stand up to the terrorists? We need someone who will never trip, someone upright like Richard Pombo, in Congress.”

Finally, I have it on good authority that Jerry McNerney doesn’t always floss when he brushes. I would think that the talented PR hacks at the NRCC could easily find a way to use that. Maybe something along the lines of this: “If he can’t even attend to his teeth properly, how can you trust him protect America? Richard Pombo ALWAYS flosses — you know that if he takes good care of his teeth, he’ll take good care of America.”

Because God forbid that Richard Pombo and the NRCC should actually talk about Iraq, tax cuts for the rich, global warming, traffic jams, levee failure, immigration, torture, gas prices, warrantless wiretapping, offshore oil drilling, Medicare Plan D, veterans’ benefits or the federal debt.

Tags: CA-11, Richard Pombo, NRCC, Mark Foley, negative advertising, Jerry McNerney