An ad tying Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to disgraced Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is set to run on cable news channels in Macomb County.
Freedom's Defense Fund, a Washigton-based group that funds Republican candidates' campaigns, says it will spend about $25,000 to air the ads over the next 10 days.
Executive director Todd Zirkle said Friday that it's fair to run the ad, which shows Obama praising Kilpatrick before speaking to the Detroit Economic Club in May 2007. At the time, Kilpatrick was not facing any charges in a text messaging scandal that led to his resignation Thursday in a plea deal involving 10 felony charges.
It will make Craig DeRoche happy, that's for sure. (Everyone wave bye to Craig!) And this group won't stop at Kwame...
Zirkle says Freedom's Defense Fund plans to run other ads tying Obama to Ayers and to his former minister, Jeremiah Wright, who came under fire for sermons in which he accused the government of conspiring against blacks.
Although the group didn't back Republican presidential nominee John McCain in the GOP primaries, Zirkle said it's determined to keep Obama from winning the White House.
"We do have serious, serious questions about Obama because we're for economic freedom and we believe he's a socialist," Zirkle said.
So, instead of talking about those "serious questions" on economic policy, you know, the real issues that face this country, conservatives instead have to resort to dishonest smear tactics to sell their brand. Why? Because they know their economic policies have failed the vast majority American people. They can't talk about jobs, health care, education - any of it - because "conservative" policy has been a disaster. So they smear. And smear. And smear. Because it's all they have. Anyone who watched their convention knew this was coming. Georgia10 summed it up best in a must-read essay on Kos the other day, and this was before McCain's speech...
Four speakers yesterday demonstrated why four decades of conservative politics have led us here today, to this broken system where a "successful" speech is not one that speaks to the issues, but is one that speaks to the ugliest side of human nature and appeals to hate rather than hope.
It is against this ragged landscape of the same, exhausted politics that John McCain will accept the Republican nomination for President. And though he will style himself as a reformer, he will bleed into the background of these small politics that have long plagued our social discourse and that have stood as deliberate barriers to real change. Because no matter how much he attempts to distance himself from what his party stands for and how it misgoverns, no amount of rhetoric can conceal that a McCain-Palin ticket ensures more of the same at a time when the American people are clamoring for change.
Surrogates like "Freedom's Defense Fund" prove that point. It's laughable (and mind-boggling) that the Republicans are trying to sell themselves as the party of "change", when their own people constantly show that they are, and they will be, "more of the same".