The 6 most aggressive GOP attempts to tie Obama to Democratic midterm candidates
From wacky ads to scary ones, Republicans did everything they could to erase the distinction between Obama and Democrats running for Congress
Republicans trying to take back the Senate and expand their advantage in the House have rallied over the past year around a common strategy: tie Democrats to President Barack Obama — at any cost and for any reason.
Candidates, parties and independent groups spent hundreds of millions to try to convince voters that Democrats on ballots all over the country not only think like Obama but are also basically him in miniature. The reason for this effort is obvious: Nationally, the president has a 42 percent approval rating, and in many of the more conservative states where embattled Democrats are fighting to keep their jobs, his favorability is even lower.
From images of terrorists to a holographic picture where one candidate’s face morphs right into Obama’s, here are some of the most memorable Republican attempts to argue that every Democrat has the same name.
New Hampshire: Shaheen is spelled O-B-A-M-A
In an ad paid for by American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC, a girl in glasses stands on a stage and is asked to spell the word “Shaheen” at a spelling bee. Photographs of incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Obama flash behind her. Struggling to come up with the spelling, the girl asks the judges to use Shaheen in a sentence, at which point they say that Shaheen has “voted for the Obama agenda 99 percent.” The girl finally lights upon the right answer, methodically spelling out O-B-A-M-A. The judges rule she can stay in the contest, because her spelling is “close enough.”
North Carolina: ‘Math is lost on Senator Hagan’
In a controversial ad that women’s groups criticized as sexist, North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Thom Tillis stood in front of a whiteboard and challenged incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan’s ability to understand math.
“Math is lost on Senator Hagan,” Tillis said in the spot, before saying that Hagan was distorting figures on Tar Heel State teacher pay to “hide her own partisan record.”
Walking down the white board, Tillis stops at a prewritten note, “Hagan votes with Obama” and fills in a “96%” before writing out the size of the national debt.
North Carolina: Hagan, Obama, terrorists
In the final weeks of the campaign, many Republican groups launched ads that linked Democrats to Obama and both to recent terrorist threats against America. North Carolina was no different, and Crossroads GPS, an affilate of American Crossroads, flooded the airwaves with an ad that showed Obama’s face, clips of Hagan and grainy video of armed terrorists zeroing in on buildings, pointing heavy artillery.
“While Obama let our guard down, the Islamic State, ISIS, embarks on mass murder, beheads Americans, threatens terrorism on American soil,” a somber voiceover declares.
The ad then shows Hagan at a press conference after a debate in the state, explaining why she missed a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing where members were briefed on IS.
In a Senate race where spending is on pace to exceed $90 million, and voters are seeing approximately 11,000 ads for either Hagan or Tillis per week, this one was perhaps the one most likely to frighten voters.
Georgia: Peekaboo! It’s Nunn’s face behind Obama’s
Republican Senate candidate David Perdue has focused on placing Democrat Michelle Nunn’s face next to Obama’s at every turn. In an October ad, Nunn’s head emerges from
behind Obama’s, creating a visual that makes it appear as if she’s hiding in the president’s shadow.
“Michelle Nunn’s desperate, untrue attacks on David Perdue hide her real goal — that’s hiding her support of Barack Obama’s job-killing big government policies,” a female voice says over the image of Nunn’s face sliding out from behind the president’s.
Surprise, Georgia voters! We bet you didn’t know Nunn was hiding back there.
In a later ad, Perdue adopted a closing tactic that’s being used in other races as well: tying Obama, the Democratic opponent, terrorism and Ebola all together into one provocative visual.
In “Trust,” voters got the patented Nunn-Obama photoshop, juxtaposed with
an image of people in hazmat suits, along with the words “terrorism” and “ebola.”
Meanwhile, Nunn has been one of the most aggressive Democrats in pushing back against attempts to tie her to Obama, releasing an ad in October to give context to an image of her with the president that Perdue had been using in ads and direct mail.
In the direct-to-camera shot, Nunn stood in front of the picture of herself with Obama and explained it was taken at an event for former president George H.W. Bush, whose Points of Light charitable organization that Nunn had run for years before taking a leave of absence from the group to run for the Senate.
Kentucky: The Obama-Grimes flicker picture
Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes has been less adept at combating the Republican attempts to tie her to Obama in Kentucky. Instead of releasing an ad, she awkwardly and repeatedly refused to say for whom she voted in the 2012 presidential election, even though she was an Obama delegate.
In the closing days of the campaign, the Kentucky Republican Party sent a mailer to hundreds of thousands of Kentucky voters, featuring a holographic image of Obama’s face and the iconic Shepard Fairey HOPE design. Turn the mailer in the light a little and the image morphs into Grimes’ face, with the message “NOPE.”
The Kentucky GOP posted a video of the mailer here.
Virginia: Digitally altered family portrait photobombers
A House race in suburban Virginia has inundated the Washington, D.C., airwaves with negative ads from Republican House candidate Barbara Comstock. Her “Taxman” spot features a closing argument that sounds like it dropped straight out of a poll-tested GOP politicians’ magnetic poetry set. She calls her opponent, John Foust, “A tax-raising Obama Democrat we can’t afford.”
The picture that goes with it is priceless.
