The race for Missouri’s open Senate seat has to be one of the strangest out there this year. As Secretary of State Robin Carnahan (D) and Rep. Roy Blunt (R) slug it out, the backdrop of this battleground includes tea party spats, attacks over the bailout and Carnahan adopting the GOP positions on tax cuts for the rich.
Carnahan Thursday told voters at the Missouri State Fair she believes “now is not the time to raise taxes” for members of any income class, Huffington Post reported and confirmed with the campaign after catching the news on a St. Louis scribe’s Twitter feed.
In a sign of the race’s nastiness, their operatives might title it Rubberstamp Robin v. Bailout Blunt. The nicknames don’t quite hold up in either case, but, hey, it’s politics.
Think back to the scary days in late September 2008 before Congress passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program more commonly referred to now as the bank bailout.
What do you think of? A suspended campaign perhaps? Or Hank Paulson on bended knee? Few news accounts mention Blunt’s participation in the famed White House meeting that led to Congress approving the George W. Bush-written plan.
Blunt, then holding the leadership post of minority whip, was named to the negotiating team. He convinced 90 Republicans to get on board, and was among those credited for saving the day. Here’s a good analysis of his role and TARP’s surfacing in the campaign.
In Carnahan’s version of those events, you would think Roy Blunt was a sort of puppetmaster. She calls him “a Key Architect of the $700 Billion Wall Street Bailout” on her website and in ads, like the one (below) that began airing on television this week. But Blunt was hardly the House’s Svengali. After all, TARP failed in the first vote, sending markets reeling, and more Republicans opposed the final plan than backed it, so he wasn’t even doing his job all that well.
But the “Bailout Blunt” moniker has stuck, and the issue has also earned Blunt serious backlash from the tea party movement that many of his GOP colleagues are exploiting.
And as Team Blunt would remind you, Carnahan said recently at a fundraiser (for which audio is available) that she “absolutely” recognized that, without the bailout, things would have been worse. (The Blunt campaign would have you believe that is the same as saying she’d vote for it.)
In the latest dust-up over the race, Blunt on Thursday was forced to pull down a Web ad that used images of World Trade Center rubble while trying to inject the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York City into the Missouri race. (A Blunt staffer got the blame for that one.)
Even though many Democrats are likely to be annoyed by Carnahan’s tax comments, since the majority of them want to stick with Obama and extend the cuts for the middle class only, Blunt says he’s not buying them, anyway.
“Robin Carnahan today attempted to fool Missourians about her rubberstamp support for job-killing tax increases, her opposition to extending the tax cuts and her opposition to making them permanent,” the Blunt campaign wrote on his site.
But calling Carnahan a “rubberstamp” also is ridiculous on its face. Reporters covering the race have accurately characterized all the distance Carnahan has put between herself and the president. Blunt even tried to use a visit from Obama against Carnahan in this ad we wrote about without great success.
Team Carnahan pushes her “bailout” point in this tough new ad below using some footage from CBS’ “Face the Nation,” in which host Bob Schieffer describes Blunt as having “carried the water” for the Bush administration. Watch:
The TPM Poll Average of this race has Blunt ahead 48.6%-Carnahan 43.2%.
