A Democratic political action committee is starting an expensive television blitz targeting Robert McDonnell, the Republicans’ presumptive Virginia gubernatorial nominee, over his party’s rejection of $125 million in federal stimulus funds for laid-off workers.
Common Sense Virginia, a group wholly funded by the Democratic Governors Association, is paying $550,000 to broadcast ads in Northern Virginia, Richmond, Roanoke and Norfolk attacking the former state attorney general. Most of that money will be spent to buy pricey air time in suburban Washington.
The advertisement advances what has become the Democrats’ principal line of attack in the 2008 governor’s race, blasting the Republican-controlled House of Delegates’ refusal last month to expand the number of people eligible for jobless benefits. The vote, which McDonnell supported, made Virginia ineligible for additional unemployment funds under the $787 billion federal stimulus package.
The 30-second spot opens on a bare refrigerator: “No groceries, no gas, no relief for thousands of Virginia’s unemployed, because Bob McDonnell helped lead the fight to reject $125 million in federal unemployment [benefits].”
Business groups and Republican lawmakers said the change in unemployment eligibility would have put Virginia employers on the hook for tax increases once the stimulus funds ran out, and attacked the Obama administration for tying policy strings to stimulus cash.
“This is another misleading, negative attack by an outside group funded by national Democrats and big national unions,” McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin said in a statement. He called the stimulus’ demands “another big government unfunded mandate which would hurt the ability of our small-business owners to create the jobs our citizens need.”
With Virginia the most competitive of two governor’s races in the nation this year, and the election’s potential to act as a stage-setter for the 2010 midterm elections, both the Democratic and Republican governors’ associations are investing heavily in the outcome.
The latter is McDonnell’s biggest contributor, handing his campaign $1.2 million in the first quarter of 2009. Like its Democratic counterpart, the Republican Governors Association is partly bankrolled by union contributions.
