The Democrats don’t really have a cavalry of outside groups this year to run the sorts of hard-hitting ads that the parties typically like to keep some distance from. So this year, they have little choice but to run them on their own.
This DCCC ad might be the most brutal of the cycle.
It tells the story of Jeff Perry, the GOP candidate hoping to take Rep. Bill Delahunt’s seat in Massachusetts’ 10th Congressional district. In a well documented scandal, Perry was the supervising officer of a cop in Wareham, Scott Flanagan, who at least twice in the mid-1990s conducted illegal strip searches of female teenage suspects.
“Imagine your teenage daughter illegally strip-searched by police,” the ad says.
“It happened repeatedly in Wareham [MA]. Jeff Perry was the supervising officer at the scene during one assault. Another assault he just tried to explain away. Several months later, Perry suddenly resigned from the force. Now he’s running for Congress, but the past is haunting him, including the father of a 14 year old victim who says ‘there’s nowhere he should run except out of town.'”
Rough stuff, and backed up by years of reporting and documentation. In the end, Flanagan spent four years in jail. Sign of the times, though, that Dems have to get this serious in Massachusetts.
Perry is running against Democrat Bill Keating, who recently raised the issue in a live debate. “[B]oth of the victims said you personally failed to protect them. One of them said you covered it up. The other said you stood five feet away and did nothing. If you can’t protect two teenage girls, how can you protect the interests of this district in Congress?”
Watch the ad below:
