A day after his opponent for the Democratic secretary of the state nomination accused him of going negative, Gerry Garcia offered to pull his latest TV ad — with an “if” attached.
Garcia’s opponent in the Aug. 10 Democratic primary didn’t go for the “if.” So the ad’s staying.
Garcia began airing the “Denise Merrill: Part Of The Problem” ad this week. It accuses her of ducking her responsibility for Connecticut’s budget crisis as a state legislator (she’s House majority leader). Click on the play arrow to watch.
Until this ad, the two campaigns had been running positive spots focused on their own candidacies in a season when other politicians have been spending millions of dollars tarring and feathering each other. Merrill told the Independent she considered Garcia’s new ad “classic, old-style, 30-second, taking stuff out of context … old-style politics.”
In response to that comment, Garcia wrote her a letter Thursday.
“In fairness to you, we would like to offer to take the television commercial off the air if you can demonstrate that we took your statements out of context,” Garcia offered. Click here to read the full letter, including Garcia’s recitation of the facts he said the commercial was based on.
Merrill spokeswoman Patty McQueen gave the campaign’s response: No thanks.
“We’re not going to debate this with them in a news story,” McQueen told the Independent. “It looks like a negative ad. It sounds like a negative ad. We stand by what we said earlier.”