The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has launched a last-ditch web ad against Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) ahead of her primary today against Lieutenant Gov. Bill Halter. The ad features a PCCC member from Arkansas named Pauline Wildman, who also stars in a Halter TV ad accusing Lincoln of wanting to cut Social Security.
The ad (below) links to the Halter video spot.
“Without Social Security, I’d be out on the street,” Wildman says in the TV ad.
The ad:
PCCC found Wildman by blasting an email to supporters, looking for someone with a compelling story about how a Social Security cut would affect them. When Wildman responded, PCCC wrote a script for her and sent it to the Halter campaign, which agreed to make the ad, according to PCCC co-founder Adam Green.
The ads make use of a comment Lincoln made during a recent debate, in which she said she’d cut spending by finding “greater efficiencies” in entitlement programs like Social Security.
The ad, however, splices together two quotes from the debate: “There are reasonable spending cuts that can be made” and “Medicare and Social Security.”
Watch:
What she really said, according to FactCheck.org, is not quite so cut and dry:
Obviously there are reasonable spending cuts that can be made and I think that we should look at that. The president’s offered us some and certainly as we move through the budgets, as well as the appropriations, we’ll look for those spending cuts. But you can’t do it all with spending cuts, and they’re exactly right. You have to look at mandatory spending programs like Medicare, and Social Security, and Medicaid. Those are the largest parts of the spending measures that we have. And so making sure what we did in health care reform, which was to create greater efficiency in health care delivery, making sure that we added 10 years of solvency to the Medicare Trust Fund, but we did so by making greater efficiencies and bringing down the cost of health care.
(Ed. note: This story has been edited since it was first posted.)
