The Labor Union AFSCME is jumping into the GOP Florida Primary with an $80,000 buy for an ad that ties Mitt Romney to the not-wildly-popular Florida governor Rick Scott.
The spot’s narrator claims, ““While Romney was a director of the Damon Corporation, the company was defrauding Medicare of millions.”
Here’s how the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent describes the ad and its background:
The basis for the ad is a 2002 Boston Globe article reporting that Romney and Bain made huge profits from the 1993 sale of a medical testing company that earned its revenues partly from a criminal scheme to defraud the Medicare system. Romney served on the board of Damon from 1990-1993 but was never implicated in any way, the Globe reported, adding that the evenual sale of Damon made Romney $473,000 and netted $7.4 million for Bain investors.
The ad uses this material to morph an image of Romney into that of the Florida Governor. “Corporate greed. Medicare fraud. Sound familiar?” the ad says, an allusion to a well known fact among Floridians — that their governor once ran the company at the center of the biggest Medicare fraud case in U.S. history.
