Former House of Bush consigliere Karl Rove has morphed into the GOP’s chief gunsel as head of the Super PAC American Crossroads and the 501(c)4 Crossroads GPS – both of which are front groups for the Republican Party and the latter of which has established a pattern of plucking the Democratic Party’s low-hanging fruit in attack ads.
Earlier this week it was a TV spot that cleverly used Bill Clinton to attack Barack Obama’s jobs bill. Now Crossroads GPS has launched an ad campaign yoking Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren to the Occupy Wall Street crowd:
Via the National Journal’s Hotline On Call:
The GOP-aligned super PAC Crossroads GPS is launching a wave of new television ads against three of this cycle’s most vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbents and two of the party’s strongest recruits.
In total, $1.8 million dollars is being spent over two weeks on the ads, which attack Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., as well as former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine and consumer advocate and Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren.
The hardbetting staff is laying plenty of 8-to-5 that this will get a lot uglier and more expensive over the next few months.
Campaign Outsider Official Sidebar™: The Wall Street Journal is entirely delinquent in identifying Rove in his weekly WSJ op-ed column as “the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush,” thereby failing to note Rove’s Crossroads connection.
This week’s installment, for instance, works hand-in-glove with the Crossroads GPS ad employing Bill Clinton to attack the Obama jobs bill:
Then there’s Bill Clinton. In his new book, “Back to Work,” he spells out his own jobs plan and then undercuts the president. While Mr. Obama obsessively demands higher taxes, Mr. Clinton says, “Right now, in this fragile economy, I don’t favor raising taxes.” Mr. Clinton is right on substance but is complicating Mr. Obama’s life.
As is Crossroads GPS.
As is the Wall Street Journal in staging Rove’s Potemkin column.
Campaign Outsider 
Isn’t “gunsel” rather harsh? Gunslinger doesn’t have the criminal connotations of gunsel.
I think that Warren made a rookie political mistake by tying herself too closely to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In politics you never attach yourself too closely to an independent group or movement over which you have no control. If OWS ends up going down the tube in anarchist led violence and looting, then Warren will be toast.
You want to align yourself with some of their ideas, not their movement itself.
Yeah, but gunsel has a better ring to it, Mike.
Greg Sargent highlights the perfect response to Crossroads’ pile o’ steaming mendacity:
“This is an ad by the one percent, for the one percent”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/quote-of-the-day/2011/11/10/gIQAtvV38M_blog.html
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