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Dahlkemper launches TV campaign

Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper (D-3) this week took her considerable financial advantage to the airwaves, launching a 60-second TV ad as her first reelection bid enters the homestretch.

Dahlkemper’s campaign said the ad started airing Monday in the Erie media market, but did not specify whether it was running on cable, broadcast or both. Erie is Dahlkemper’s home base, and the northwest Pennsylvania district is one of the cheaper House seats in which to advertise. Dahlkemper, considered at least on paper to be one of the most vulnerable Democrats in Congress, presumably has the resources to stay on TV through Election Day.

“The reason I come back home every weekend is that the solutions to the problems we face are found here,” Dahlkemper says in the ad, which is mostly a soft biographical spot focusing on her family and small business background.

“And Congress,” she adds, “I call it like I see it, because that’s how I was raised.”

Dahlkemper’s relatively early TV buy could put pressure on Republican Mike Kelly’s campaign to soon follow suit. Kelly, a Butler car dealer, has largely funded his campaign with loans from his own bank account, but has so far struggled to raise money elsewhere.

In the ad, embedded at bottom, Dahlkemper spotlights her vote against cap-and-trade energy legislation. She also says she voted “against a bailout that helped Wall Street.” It was not immediately clear to which bailout vote she was referring. The votes that authorized the financial bailout occurred in 2008, before Dahlkemper took office. It’s likely her campaign was spotlighting a symbolic House vote in early 2009. In that vote, the House opposed authorizing access to the second half of bailout funds. But the Senate had already voted down the same resolution, making the House vote moot, a symbolic action that provided an opportunity for political cover but had no actual impact at the time it was taken (both chambers had to explicitly oppose spending the rest of the money for the bailout funds to be cut short).

“Kathy Dahlkemper,” the ad concludes, “the courage to care, the values to do what’s right.”

August 26, 2010 at 9:34 am

--pa2010.com Staff

Tags: Kathy Dahlkemper, Mike Kelly, PA-3

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