The Republican who hopes to replace the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D) in West Virginia, wealthy businessman John Raese, is up with a new TV commercial that — not surprisingly — tries to tie the Democratic nominee, Gov. Joe Manchin, to the policies of President Obama. What is at least a little surprising about it is that the ad attempts to make its point about how close Obama and Machin are by showing a photo of the two men sharing a moment at Byrd’s memorial service in July.
The Byrd family has cried foul, calling the use of the photo in the ad “tasteless and insensitive.” Raese’s campaign claims it didn’t know where image was taken before using it.
“That’s a stock photo,” Raese campaign manager Jim Dornan told the AP. “We had no idea it was from the memorial service.”
We did a quick Google search and found it wasn’t hard to tie the photo to the memorial. Here’s Raese’s ad in full (the image in question pops up in the first 10 seconds or so):
The latest poll of the race, from Rasmussen, shows the Democrat Manchin leading Raese by a closer-than-expected 48-42.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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