The race to replace retiring Louisiana Sen. David Vitter has been a chaotic affair, and now Republican Rep. John Fleming, a favorite of outsider groups like the Club for Growth, is hoping to take advantage of that chaos. Following a recent spat between Rep. Charles Boustany and state Treasurer John Kennedy, Fleming is out with one of those commercials that attacks his opponents for attacking one another.
The spot features a cafeteria full of well-dressed men throwing food at one another, as the narrator explains, “First, Kennedy attacks Boustany as a wasteful-spending liberal. Then Kennedy attacks Boustany on character.” By contrast, the narrator declares that Fleming “is fighting the real enemy: Obama and Clinton” and praises him for standing with Donald Trump on immigration and terrorism. And of course by repeating Boustany and Kennedy’s charges against one another, Fleming is giving them more oxygen.
Fleming doesn’t go into much detail about Kennedy’s attacks on Boustany’s character, though a newspaper flashes on screen reading, “Kennedy operatives spread Boustany story.” A few weeks ago, an investigative journalist named Ethan Brown released a book in which he claimed that Boustany was the client of several prostitutes who were later murdered. (Brown does not allege that Boustany had anything to do with their deaths.) Boustany denied everything and no new information has emerged. However, Kennedy took advantage of the situation to spread the story around while denying he had anything to do with spreading it around.
Boustany was not amused, and he held a press conference bashing Kennedy as “the only candidate who has spread this false story against me.” Fleming mostly stayed quiet during all this, so he’s hoping that Boustany and Kennedy will just pulverize one another. Senate hopefuls need to win first or second place in November to advance to a likely December runoff (assuming no one takes a majority in the first round) and, aside from a recent Fleming internal, polls consistently show him taking less than 10 percent of the vote. However, there are still plenty of undecideds, and Fleming is relying on his image as a hardcore conservative champion to help him break through.
Kennedy started this race as the best-known candidate, and for a while, polls had him easily taking the top spot November. However, a few recent surveys say that he’s in danger of losing a runoff perch altogether, whether it’s to Boustany or Fleming, or to Democrats Foster Campbell or Caroline Fayard, though there aren’t enough polls out there to get a clear picture of this race.
Kennedy himself went up with a minute-long ad during Monday’s New Orleans Saints game that features him talking to the camera and arguing that “we’ve got too many undeserving people at the top getting bailouts, and we’ve got too many undeserving people at the bottom getting handouts, and we at the middle get stuck with the bill.” Kennedy goes on to criticize Obama and Congress for doing nothing while incomes were stagnant, saying, “they ought to hide their heads in a bag.” The screen actually shows an image of members of Congress’ heads being replaced with bags, which may or may not be a reference to how some Saints’ fans wore sacks over their heads during the team’s awful 1-and-15 1980 season that earned them the nickname “the Aints.” (Though it’s downright strange if Kennedy is actually comparing Congress to Saints fans.)
Kennedy then promotes himself as someone who can fix the problem because he’s “not part of any insider club, and never will be.” To prove his point, he announces: “I’d rather drink weed killer.” Kennedy has been state treasurer since 2000 and he’s run for Senate twice before (as both a Democrat and a Republican), so he’s not exactly Mr. Political Outsider. But hey, he’s made it this long without chugging Roundup, so he must be okay, right?
All in all, this is a pretty odd ad, and, aside from the last line about weed killer, it’s really not all that memorable. But Kennedy’s main GOP foes are both House members, so it does make sense that he’s contrasting himself with an unpopular Congress, though he doesn’t mention or show either Boustany or Fleming on screen.