In Poker it’s called “going all in.” You bet everything on a single hand even though if your hunch that the cards you hold are winners, you stand to lose your shirt. For incumbent Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, it’s his job — not his shirt — that is on the line.
According to today’s Real Clear Politics average, prior lags behind GOP challenger Tom Cotton by 3 percentage points. Though the race remains in the toss-up category, Pryor has come out with a campaign ad that essentially declares he is “going all in.”
The theme of the ad, which appears below, is that Cotton is “pro-Ebola.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-DwHaEwXfY
“Tom Cotton voted against preparing America for pandemics like Ebola,” a voiceover gravely intones.
Pandemic? Early last month, when the the first reported cases of Ebola turning up in Kenya made headlines, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden took to the airwaves to assure Americans that the Ebola virus was transmissible solely by bodily fluids and was not airborne. Fears of outbreaks in New York and other urban centers were quickly quashed.
Stories on the disease have receded as has the general public’s concern, both of which conditions make the Pryor ad questionable. So foolish is the ad that Aaron Blake of the Washington Post cynically wrote:
It might not be the “Daisy” ad, but Pryor’s ad is certainly in the same genre of scare-tastic political advertising. And when it comes to him and other red-state Democrats fighting to keep their jobs this fall, expect more like it.
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