SPIN DOCTORS

Campaign Ads Turn to Blaming China

And the candidates who outsource jobs.

Republicans and Democrats aren’t using their campaign ads to call each other out for just anything anymore. They have found a new common weapon and, it turns out, it’s not even in the United States. It’s China. Tapping into the fact that voters’ main concern this November is the lack of jobs, each side is now blaming the other for letting jobs be outsourced. Just in the last week or so, at least 29 candidates have deployed new ads slamming their opponents for letting jobs escape Americans. Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid opened an ad with images of Chinese factory workers and the claim that Republican Sharron Angle was “a foreign worker’s best friend.” Experts are saying that they have never seen China so obviously used as a scapegoat during campaigns. “To bring one country into the crosshairs in so many districts, at such a late stage of the campaign, represents something new and a calculated gamble,” said the former president of the U.S.-China Business Council. “I find it deplorable. I find it demeaning.”