New Hampshire Senate candidate Scott Brown is continuing to hammer Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) on national security with a new ad tying the senator to President Obama.
{mosads}The ad features shots of Brown dressed in his National Guard uniform as a narrator declares, “Scott Brown spent 35 years in the Army National Guard. He knows what it takes to keep America safe.”
In contrast, Shaheen “supports President Obama’s failed foreign policy,” the narrator says, followed by a clip of Obama’s comment that “we don’t have a strategy” to deal with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The ad also hits Shaheen for missing a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing “where a top official gave an early warning about” ISIS. Shaheen’s hearing absences have come under fire by New Hampshire Republicans, but Democrats have hit back with the fact that Brown, as a senator from Massachusetts, missed every hearing on border security he could’ve attended as a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, per The Washington Post.
Brown’s other ad charges that Shaheen changed after heading to Washington.
“Remember when Jeanne Shaheen said New Hampshire voters want an independent voice?” a narrator asks, followed by a clip of Shaheen declaring, “I am going to be that senator.”
“Then Jeanne Shaheen went to Washington, where she has voted with President Obama 99 percent of the time. Not even Jeanne Shaheen thinks that’s a good idea,” the narrator ads.
The ad closes with a clip of Shaheen admitting, when asked if the president is “right 99 percent of the time,” that “nobody’s right 99 percent of the time.”
Shaheen’s communications director, Harrell Kirstein, said in a statement that the ads were meant to “distract” from Brown’s own record of missing hearings, and charged it’s Brown who’s out of touch with New Hampshire.
“It’s rich to hear Scott Brown lecture voters on what’s right for New Hampshire considering his record of protecting special breaks for Wall Street, Big Oil and companies that outsource jobs to China and Mexico,” he said. “Scott Brown is only out for these corporate interests that fund his campaigns and line his pockets. He’s not for New Hampshire.”
Shaheen is facing the fight of her career from Brown, who put the race on the map for Republicans when he jumped in this Spring. He’s worked to make Obama’s flagging popularity a serious liability for the senator, and has hammered her on foreign policy in particular.
Polls have been mixed, with most showing Shaheen holding a single-digit lead, though a few polls out in September showed the race tightening.