Story highlights
Kentucky Senate candidate tries to separate herself from President Obama
Alison Grimes takes shots at clay pigeons and opponent Mitch McConnell
Ad shows photo of McConnell holding rifle overhead: "Mitch, that's not how you hold a gun"
Holding a shotgun and shooting skeet, the Democratic candidate out to topple Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell attempts to flip the script in a new television ad.
The ad shows Alison Lundergan Grimes blasting away, then pops in a picture of McConnell brandishing a gun upside down over his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year.
“Mitch, that’s not how you hold a gun,” Grimes says.
Grimes is not Barack Obama, she says, no matter what McConnell “wants you to think.”
“Mitch was the same guy who thought Duke basketball players were UK.”
That reference is to a McConnell campaign ad that mistakenly placed video of Duke University’s basketball team celebrating a 2010 NCAA championship win instead of the Kentucky Wildcats’ 2012 win.
McConnell has painted a vote for Grimes as a vote for Obama, and a CNN/ORC poll from earlier this month showed about two-thirds of Kentucky voters harbor an unfavorable view of the President. McConnell’s pitch is that the only way to alter the balance of power in Washington is through a GOP Senate takeover on Election Day that would put him in charge – if he can beat Grimes, who would be Kentucky’s first woman senator.
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Grimes says in the new ad that McConnell is “attacking me on coal after doing nothing while we’ve lost thousands of coal jobs.”
McConnell has vowed to roll back Obama regulations that Republicans loathe, especially Environmental Protection Agency rules on coal that Kentuckians see as harmful to their coal-rich economy.
“He even said it’s not his job to bring jobs to Kentucky,” she says in the ad before firing another shot.
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“I’m not Barack Obama,” she says, “I disagree with him on guns, coal and the EPA.
The ad is reminiscent of then-West Virginia Senate candidate Joe Manchin’s 2010 TV ad that showed him shooting a cap and trade bill with a rifle. His GOP opponent had painted him as a surrogate for Obama. The Senate Democrat went on to win.