August 4, 2010 12:25PM # New Attack Ad Provides an Early Look at the Fall Campaign By [John Samples](https://www.cato.org/people/john-samples) --- SHARE The [Jack Conway for Senator ](http://www.jackconway.org/)campaign has run an [attack ad](http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/76753/rand-pauls-electoral-gauntlet-kentucky-map) on *The New Republic* website disguised as an article about Rand Paul by one of the magazine’s interns. The tipoff is the word “radical” which appears five times in a short article along with “eccentric,” “unconventional” and similar words. (Doesn’t TNR bother to edit the web-only stuff?) Yeah, yeah, you’re saying by the end of the article, I get it: Paul is a radical, weirdo libertarian. The evidence so far suggests that the Conway for Senate campaign seeks to paint Paul as an extremist while Jack, of course, is a moderate who will provide plenty of pork and don’t worry about the debt. Like most Democrats, Conway is facing a tough electorate this year, and he is responding [by the party’s political playbook](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/fix-daily-poll/fix-daily-poll-democrats-georg.html): demonize, mobilize, and spend. He will have adequate funds to pursue that strategy along with more than a little help from affiliated [outside groups](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091801698.html) like TNR. Parts of the article provide a useful political analysis of Kentucky’s different regions, presumably provided by the Conway campaign. So the article does offer a look into how Conway thinks he can win this. Our intern concludes that the Conway-Paul race “is suddenly a close race.” It is true that a survey at the end of June, cited by TNR, indicated an even division. But the article appeared on August 4, and three polls in July showed Paul up by 3 to 9 points, the last one having Paul over fifty percent for the first time. That most recent poll also indicated that Paul had the support of one-quarter of Democrats and two-thirds of independents in the state. With TNR flailing around like this, the Conway campaign seems pretty desperate pretty early. ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).