AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
In a two-minute broadcast TV advertisement, a conservative Super PAC is asking the Arizona press to “stand up” to the national media and make “liberal extremist” Senator Mark Kelly answer for his “corrupt bargain” with left-wing radicals in the Democratic Party. The ad also asks Arizona voters to “send a message to the media bosses” who represent “the most corrupt institutions in America.”
In the TV spot and an extended three-minute online version of the ad, the group asks Kelly “how he can say he isn’t a left-wing extremist if every time he votes like one,” and likewise calls on Arizona journalists to question Kelly on his extremist positions on the campaign trail. The ad, which launched Thursday night, is set to run on the Phoenix TV nightly news and Sunday political talk shows through next week.
The Arizona Senate race between Kelly and Republican Blake Masters—widely expected to be one of the most competitive in the nation—could determine which party controls the Senate come January 2023. “Mark Kelly is a perfect example of why a red wave is coming in states like Arizona,” said George Landrith, president of Frontiers of Freedom Action, the group that aired the ad. “He wants to run as a moderate, but like every Senate Democrat, he is imperiled by his corrupt bargain with the left which said in effect: ‘Don’t primary me and I will vote your way.’”
The ad’s release comes just days after the group aired a similar TV spot in New York markets, criticizing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as “the media’s chosen candidate,” which was hailed by one conservative news outlet as the “greatest campaign ad of all time.” Like the New York TV blitz, the first minute of the Arizona spot focuses chiefly on the media for trying to “crush dissent” and hide corruption, displaying headlines about media scandals and smears—including its suppression of the COVID-19 lab leak theory, censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell, promotion of the Russian collusion hoax, a coverup of Hillary Clinton’s email scandals, and refusal to report on Biden’s blackmailing of the Ukrainian government. The ad also catalogs other political smears, like those against General Michael Flynn, students at Covington Catholic High School, and parents protesting anti-Americanism in their local schools.
The ad goes on to blame the media for elevating Joe Biden to the presidency by letting him run “from his basement” and “covering up his incompetence and ill health.” It then goes on to smear Biden as “the worst president in modern history,” and features videos of him falling up the stairs on Air Force One and taking directions from the Easter Bunny at a White House event with the headline “EASTER BUNNY RUNS WHITE HOUSE EVENT.”
Around the halfway mark of the two-minute TV spot, the ad labels Kelly as Biden’s “key enabler,” noting that he votes with Biden 92 percent of the time and “cast the deciding vote on huge spending bills that cause shattering inflation and recession”—referring to the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” which economists predict will even further aggravate inflation and raise costs for Arizona families.
Additionally, the ad notes how attempts by the likes of Biden and Kelly to push a radical takeover of elections—as well as efforts by other Democrats to alter the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Senate, American citizenship, and the Electoral College—represent a “scorched-earth, rule-or-ruin” attack on longstanding American democratic institutions. “The GOP has never gotten across to the people how those bills would have destroyed the secret ballot, but Department of Justice bureaucrats in charge of our elections, abolished citizenship rights, packed the Supreme Court into irrelevance, radically changed the U.S. Senate, and made a few states the only thing that mattered in presidential elections by abolishing the Electoral College,” said Landrith.
The ad concludes with a call for the people of Arizona to “make the media bosses the 2022 issue” before stating that Kelly “was the 50th senator and could have forced Biden and Schumer to stop the deliberate border crisis.” Mark Kelly, the ad goes on to say, “is a symptom of all that is wrong about Washington. Why did Mark Kelly go to the big city and forget the people who sent him there?”
“This Senate race is not a personality contest,” Landrith said. “Kelly’s opponent is a great candidate, but even if he weren’t, this issue is Kelly’s left-wing extremist voting in the Senate.”
Although Kelly has thus far maintained a marginal lead over Masters in statewide polling, the release of the ad could go a long way in further tightening the race and compelling moderates, independents, and disaffected Democrats to reconsider their support for Kelly as their representative in the Senate.