President Obama bashed Mitt Romney by name this week, in a sign that the presidential race is finally in general election mode. Likewise, as voters begin settling down-ticket primary contests, the race for control of Congress is finally taking shape. The Senate is only four seats away from Republican control, and Democrats are already spending millions to preserve their party’s seats. Pundits who track elections hunt for the closest, hardest-fought contests — those with the most red flags — to form their judgments.
John Feehery, spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, said he looks for those flags by studying a member’s voting behavior. “You can always tell that a politician is in trouble on the big votes when he only wants to talk about the small ones,” said Feehery. “Between the 10 or 20 big votes that will really impact people’s lives — like Obamacare, cap and trade, or the Obama stimulus package — there are hundreds of pointless symbolic votes designed to score partisan points for the next election.”
Take Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who is flying several red flags, and high. He voted for every item in Feehery’s list and supported the president’s agenda about 95 percent of the time. That’s not popular in Montana, where Obama’s approval rating is 34 percent.
Tester’s challenger this year is Republican Denny Rehberg, Montana’s at-large representative in Congress. This week’s Rasmussen poll showed Rehberg slightly ahead of Tester, 47 percent to 44 percent, unchanged from February. All these red flags are enough to make a re-election campaign panic.
And then another red flag suddenly and mysteriously began to wave.
A month ago, a Washington-based super-PAC called the Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund — also called the CSS Action Fund — flooded Montana radio and television airwaves with an anti-Rehberg attack campaign, a so-called “electioneering communication,” or issue ad, which mentions a candidate but doesn’t explicitly tell viewers to vote for or against them. The commercial, titled “Promises,” accused Rehberg of voting himself a pay raise five times in a row.
Legislative documents show that Rehberg never did that. Quite the contrary, he co-sponsored at least five bills with titles such as “Rescind the Congressional Pay Raise Act” and “Eliminates automatic cost of living adjustments for Members of Congress.”
Who is behind this shady ad campaign? Federal Election Commission records show very little, other than three affiliated groups that work under the same name, with another possibly unaffiliated. No one knows who is really behind their operation or where their backing comes from.
Why this bewildering CSS cluster is riding to Tester’s rescue is unknown. The senator’s campaign staff claims to know nothing about CSS, but has gleefully piggybacked on its anti-Rehberg ads with press releases that claim the messages as their own. With the economy in shambles, accusations of giving oneself a pay raise carry a potent political punch.
Tester knows well that Rehberg didn’t vote for his own pay raise: It’s impossible. The law that has governed congressional pay since 1989 raises their salaries automatically, based on a private-sector measurement known as the “Employment Cost Index.” A Congressional Research Service report, “Salaries of Members of Congress,” says that pay raises occur unless Congress specifically blocks them, and that in the past two decades, “Congress has accepted a raise 13 times and denied itself a pay increase on seven occasions.”
What does Rehberg think about the senator mimicking this shadowy CSS bunch?
“Denny believes that groups running election ads should publicly disclose their donors, just like candidates have to,” said Chris Bond, a spokesman for Rehberg. “Transparency is important, because folks in Montana deserve to know that even though Senator Tester ran on an anti-lobbyist platform in 2006, the independent Center for Responsive Politics reports that he is now the number-one recipient of lobbyist campaign cash in Congress.”
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
