OH-Sen: Democrat Ted Strickland is reportedly headed on to the airwaves with his first TV ad of the general election, but the expected minute-long spot does not yet appear to be online. That may be because, as the Hotline reports, the ad is airing "a month ahead of its initial reservations." It will apparently air starting on Wednesday for about a week, backed by a $584,000 buy. It makes sense that Strickland would want to move up his schedule, since polls show him slipping, but the flipside is that his fundraising has been poor and he potentially jeopardizes his ability to air a sufficient number of ads down the stretch this way.
It's a risky move, but at least Strickland has allies willing to help him. One of them is the powerful union AFSCME, which is spending a reported $1.1 million to once again trot out Annoying Guy in a Suit on a Segway. This time, not-G.O.B. Bluth rolls past a shuttered factory and berates Republican Sen. Rob Portman for voting "to give tax breaks to companies that shipped our jobs overseas." Segway Dude certainly seems like the wrong messenger for this, though: In his slick duds and fancy haircut, he looks like the kind of person who closed down that factory, not someone who worked there. (In other words, like a young Mitt Romney.) And embarrassingly, he even pulls out a miniature Chinese flag at the end, as he declares that Portman gave firms a tax break "for packing up the[ir] equipment and shipping it to places like China." It's not as awful as the fortune cookies, but that's not saying much.
Meanwhile, the NRSC is hitting a very familiar theme in their new ad attacking Strickland. As a skydiver tumbles toward the earth, a narrator slams Strickland for "wast[ing]" Ohio's rainy-day fund—a "billion dollar parachute" that Strickland allegedly spent down to nothing. Here's the thing: It frickin' poured when the Great Recession hit in 2008. Isn't that the purpose of a rainy-day fund in the first place, to tide a government over when the going gets rough? If Strickland hadn't dipped into it, Republicans would be slamming him for having made the downturn even worse. Gah.