Christine O’Donnell’s campaign appears to have paid nearly $100K a pop to produce two ads alerting Delaware voters that she was: “not a witch“; and that she “didn’t go to Yale.”
TPM’s review of her latest financial disclosure shows that the O’Donnell’s campaign made two payments to Strategic Perception Inc. on Oct. 4 and Oct. 12 that totaled up to $199,855. The witch-debunking ad premiered on the 4th while the Yale ad went up on the 7th.
Through October and November, O’Donnell’s campaign paid Smart Media Group to handle their media buys. Since the company places ads in multiple mediums, it isn’t clear exactly how much of the money went to air the television ads.
Strategic Perceptions Inc. has a long history of working on the campaigns of Republican candidates. Company founder Fred Davis transformed his family’s public relations firm into a political and corporate firm based in Los Angeles. The company has produced ads for the Senate campaigns of John McCain, Carly Fiorina, Elizabeth Dole and Jim Inhofe. They also produced a spot for McCain’s presidential campaign which said that Barack Obama was “the biggest celebrity in the world” but questioned whether he was ready to lead. A call to Davis wasn’t immediately returned.
As TPM reported, O’Donnell also added an anti same-sex marriage advocate to her payrolls in the waning days of her campaign — in addition to employing both her Christian musician roommate and her sister.
O’Donnell recently announced that she is forming a new organization tentatively named Christine PAC and said paperwork could be filed as early as this week.
“It’s in the works right now,” O’Donnell said. “The sooner, the better so we can be more vocal. The purpose of my PAC is not getting behind individual candidates but more so issues. I talked about repealing the death tax but also Obamacare.”
