In Georgia, leaked campaign memo ensures attacks

BILL BARROW
Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — The first outside political group has already started to hammer Georgia Democrat Michelle Nunn using her leaked campaign plan that detailed her strategy and discussed her potential weaknesses as an Atlanta nonprofit executive seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Republicans and Democrats agree that even more powerful blows will come later, as GOP nominee David Perdue and the independent Super PACs that support him try to use the Nunn campaign’s words against her in a deluge of television attacks

Outside groups have already spent more than $8 million on the race, and Perdue, a former corporate CEO, is wealthy enough to finance whatever level of advertising he desires. The question is whether those attacks persuade voters in a contest that will help determine which party controls the Senate for the last year of President Barack Obama’s administration.

“The outside groups are going to take this and go nuclear on her,” said Georgia GOP strategist Joel McElhannon of the memos first published by the conservative magazine National Review, which said they were unintentionally uploaded briefly to Nunn’s campaign website in December.

A super PAC financed by billionaire conservative Joe Ricketts — the TDAmeritrade founder and owner of baseball’s Chicago Cubs — was first to turn material from the memos into an ad, backed with a seven-figure buy this weekend.

The 30-second spot from Ending Spending Action Fund follows previous Ricketts attacks on Nunn. The new ad uses quotes from the leaked document to tell voters that “Nunn’s campaign worries she’s too liberal … a lightweight … not a ‘real’ Georgian,” among other charges. Those partial quotes come from the document’s outline of attacks that Nunn could expect from Republicans.

But McElhannon said the distortion is just why disclosure of the 144-page document hurts Nunn.

The GOP, he said, will continue using the memos to buttress their claims that Nunn is “being dishonest with voters” by campaigning as a moderate “who is above all the usual politics.”

A top Nunn backer, former Democratic Rep. George “Buddy” Darden, downplayed the expected GOP offensive. “This is all stuff they would say anyway,” he said. “This will ultimately just be a blip on the screen.”

For her part, Nunn said the disclosure doesn’t change her fundamental message. “What’s remained constant is we’re focused on talking about a collaborative approach … and changing the culture in Washington,” she told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution this week. Her campaign declined to make her available to The Associated Press.

And even before the latest attack ad, she’s already taken to criticizing Ricketts on the campaign trail, casting him as an example of outside money that poisons the political process.

The document is a compilation of consultant-written memos that detail Nunn’s hopes to increase minority voter turnout while building a fundraising behemoth to compete with Republicans. The outline of Republican attacks notes everything from her ties with national Democrats to loose associations between her Points of Light Foundation and a Palestinian charity with its own alleged link to Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, at war with Israel. Both get mention in the Ricketts ad.

Gathering such details isn’t uncommon in a major campaign, but GOP consultant Chip Lake said having the most frank assessments on paper is unusual.

Every campaign depends on money, but the Nunn memo states plainly that “hitting our targets will require us to prioritize fundraising above all else and to focus the candidate’s time on it with relentless intensity.” The document identifies the Jewish community as a “tremendous financial opportunity” but cautions that “the level of support will be contingent on her position” on Israel.

Nunn doesn’t shy away from the fact that she grew up in suburban Washington while her father, Sam Nunn, represented Georgia in the Senate. But one memo says that to reach small-town and rural voters, the campaign should present “Michelle and her family in rural settings with rural-oriented imagery.” There also are plans for events with farmers and gun owners, whom the memo describes as “validators.” Said Lake, “That makes it awfully easy for us to say, ‘Look, she doesn’t really care about you. She’s just using you.'”

Democrats have identified Nunn as perhaps their best opportunity to pick up a seat and frustrate the GOP’s push for a Senate majority. Republicans need six more senators to run the chamber, and they acknowledge the importance of holding retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss’s seat. At the least, Nunn supporters concede that the leak is an unwelcomed bump for a candidate with little-to-no margin for error in a state Obama lost twice.

Several Democrats were reluctant to discuss the memos or their fallout publicly but noted that many portions Republicans have been most gleeful over are simply the Nunn campaign predicting Republican lines of attack, just like those in the latest ad from Ricketts’ group.

McElhannon argued: “It won’t matter whether that fairly represents what her consultants actually said. Everyone in this business is a used-car salesman to some degree.”

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Follow Barrow on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/BillBarrowAP.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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