RGA goes negative on Corzine record
Posted: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 12:33 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Republicans , Ads , 2009
From NBC's Domenico Montanaro Incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine has been running negative ads against opponent Chris Christie for about a week or so. Now the moneyed Republican Governors Association is hitting back again. The RGA is up with an ad hitting Corzine for what it sees as the incumbent's fatal flaw -- his record. (The RGA has been running ads for weeks on this very subject.)
"Jon Corzine said he'd cut taxes; he raised them by billions," an announcer says. "Corzine said he'd bring jobs to New Jersey; unemployment is up 73%. Now he's spending millions falsely attacking Chris Christie. Corzine -- watch what he does, not what he says."
(By the way, according to our calculations, unemployment is actually up 83% -- not 73% -- since Corzine took office in January 2006. In January 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , unemployment in the state was 4.8%. The latest New Jersey number -- from May 2009 -- is 8.8%.)
The ad is going up statewide on cable, and it's already up on network TV in the very expensive New York and Philadelphia media markets. The RGA is also up on radio in both markets. "It’s definitely big enough to make an impact," spokesman Mike Schrimpf tells First Read.
*** UPDATE *** Factcheck.org writes though of similar RGA claims that they are "misleading." On unemployment going up 73%, FactCheck gives this context: that "the state's unemployment rate has actually risen by a smaller percentage than the nation's over the same recession-plagued time period." To the claim that Corzine " 'told us that he wouldn't raise taxes,' then went and did so," FactCheck points out that "Corzine refused to take a no-tax pledge and left himself an out, saying, 'We're not raising taxes unless we're absolutely pushed up against the wall.'"
*** UPDATE 2 *** Since the FactCheck item is a couple of months old, we went back to track what hte U.S. unemployment rate is and was to see how New Jersey tracks. The national average went up 102%, up from 4.7% in January 2006 to 9.5% in May 2009. So New Jersey's 83% is still less than the national average.