Rep. Ben Cardin and Lt. Gov. Michael Steele are running new TV ads in the U.S. Senate campaign using old photos and video clips to go after each other?s record and score points.
Steele shows a 1967 photo of newly elected Del. Cardin and then asks: “Now, after 40 years in politics, Ben Cardin says he can change politics?”
“We?ve got problems in both parties,” Republican Steele says. On education, “Republicans built a system that teaches to a test. Ben Cardin and Democrats put bureaucracy ahead of our kids.
“Some Republicans forget folks still climbing the ladder,” he goes on. “Cardin and Democrats just raise their taxes.
“Ben Cardin can?t change Washington, but you and I can,” Steele concludes.
The ad supplies no specifics, but he offers viewers a 21-page “Steele Plan for Change,” available on his Web site, compiling previous position papers on some topics and new twists on others.
Cardin?s latest spot skewers Steele in his own words. The 75-word script mentions Steele four times and President Bush five times, tying Steele to the Iraq war, special interest money and privatizing Social Security.
Then the voice-over says: “Now Steele wants you to believe he will follow his own convictions.”
It clinches the toxic Bush connection with a video clip of Steele addressing the 2004 GOP convention, as he declares: “The standard bearer of these convictions is George W. Bush.”
At the time, Steele?s convention speech was considered a coup, introducing him on a national stage. Steele?s “Plan for Change” does little to counter Cardin?s charges.
Steele has consistently opposed “the political gamesmanship of publicly stating any kind of timetable for withdrawal from Iraq,” as Cardin has for months. But on WOLB radio Thursday, Steele made his harshest criticism of Iraq policy.
“We are getting deeper and deeper into a mess,” Steele said. “It is a wrong strategy” to fight the insurgency with conventional tactics.
“I want to get it done,” restoring stability and self-rule in Iraq, he said. But the important question is “what is Iraq going to look like after our troops leave?”
