LOVE AND WAR IN THE RACE FOR MAYOR
New Rahm ad tries — again — to tie Mac to Trump
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is redoubling his efforts to tie Garry McCarthy to President Donald Trump and Trump’s controversial attorney Rudolph Giuliani in an apparent attempt to knock McCarthy out of his second-place perch.
The Facebook ad released Tuesday by the Emanuel campaign is strikingly similar to the web ad released on the day the former Chicago police superintendent formerly entered the race against the mayor who fired him.
It opens with a narrator proclaiming that “big-shot Republicans really like Garry McCarthy,” followed by a clip of Trump praising McCarthy to the hilt.
“The head of the police in Chicago is a person I know. He’s a phenomenal guy,” Trump proclaims.
As a Valentine heart envelopes photos of Trump and McCarthy, the narrator declares there is “mutual admiration . . . . One columnist noted that a McCarthy speech ‘sounded almost Trump-like at times.’ ”
Trump is shown again saying, “He’s a phenomenal guy.” The narrator then says, “A local Republican leader approached McCarthy about serving in Trump’s administration. And Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani weighed in with big bucks for McCarthy’s campaign.”
Trump is shown for a third time saying, “He’s a phenomenal guy.” The narrator closes by saying, “Mayoral candidate Garry McCarthy: the No. 1 choice of big-shot Republicans.”
McCarthy branded the Facebook ad “patently false.”
“Rahm should focus on his job of reducing gun violence, fixing pensions and improving education across the city, instead of making up false stories and posting them on Facebook,” McCarthy was quoted as saying in an emailed statement.
“Nine days ago, I issued a challenge to debate this mayor on the deadly serious topic of gun violence, but got no response from him. So, instead of discussing that important issue, he resorts to this.”
Emanuel’s new attack ad comes just one day after a poll bankrolled by Michael Sacks, Emanuel’s close friend, business adviser and largest political donor, showed McCarthy firmly entrenched in second place.
After the weekend bloodbath that saw 71 people shot, 12 of them dead, Giuliani took to Twitter to denounce Emanuel and trumpet McCarthy as a “policing genius” who “can do for Chicago what I did for NYC.”
But Giuliani mistakenly referred to McCarthy as Jerry, misspelled Emanuel’s last name and grossly overestimated the body count.