The Ted Cruz for Senate campaign, which maintains it’s taking the high road and sticking to issues while rival David Dewhurst has gotten personal and nasty, released a 60-second radio ad on Tuesday that slams the lieutenant governor for alleged “flip flops” on illegal immigration and state payroll taxes.
It comes as Cruz campaign manager John Drogin is warning supporters of the former state solicitor general of Dewhurst’s “lies” about Cruz’s tangential involvement as a private attorney in a Pennsylvania juvenile-prison privatization scandal. The Cruz campaign obviously suspects Dewhurst is going to put out more than an Internet video about Cruz’s appellate work in an insurance-payment lawsuit for jail builder and convicted felon Robert K. Mericle.
Drogin said the Dewhurst web video, which we blogged about here Monday, “ falsely tries to tie Ted to construction company owner Robert Mericle’s involvement in a Pennsylvania juvenile detention facility scandal. But Ted had nothing to do with the underlying criminal scandal; instead, he simply worked on a civil appeal between Mericle and an insurance company.” Drogin directs supporters to this fact sheet on the “kids for cash” scandal on Cruz’s website.
As for Cruz’s new radio spot, it uses a pancake motif to describe Dewhurst’s alleged switches on policy matters — things the Cruz camp says are more important to Texans than Chinese tires and Pennsylvania judicial corruption.
“The ad continues the Cruz campaign’s focus on issues that matter to Texans, in contrast to Dewhurst’s increasing desperate reliance on negative personal character attacks,” a Cruz release said.
The ad — and you can read the script on the jump — centers on recent disclosures that Dewhurst’s state office removed from its website a speech he gave in Laredo five years ago, in which he supported a guest worker program for illegal immigrants; and a Politifact finding that Dewhurst indeed discussed a payroll tax during the 2005-2006 school finance and tax-swap deliberations of the Texas Legislature.