Bredesen’s time in office is targeted
CHATTANOOGA — Former Gov. Phil Bredesen is facing scrutiny and responding to a new ad paid for by a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that focuses on the Democrat’s time in office.
On Tuesday, the Senate Leadership Fund said it spent $1.1 million Tennessee to run a new ad, dubbed “Out of Touch.”
“For over 30 years, multimillionaire politician Phil Bredesen has supported higher taxes,” a narrator says in the ad.
Without citing any examples or news stories, the ad says when Bredesen was Nashville mayor, he supported “massive property tax hikes.”
Bredesen raised property taxes three times during his six years as mayor. But the overall property tax rate — which adjusts automatically during reappraisal years — decreased by 57 cents
With the exception of former Mayor Megan Barry and Mayor David Briley, who has been in office six months, every Metro mayor has raised property taxes at some point during their administration.
Turning to his time as governor, the ad says Bredesen raised taxes and fees by nearly $1 billion.
The claim comes from a 2010 Chattanooga Times Free Press story that noted Bredesen’s administration raised taxes on cigarettes to help fund education, a one-year hospital assessment fee and employer taxes to prevent the state’s unemployment trust fund from going broke.
Such efforts to raise taxes and fees, which also included closing corporate tax loopholes, was approved by the legislature with bipartisan support.
The new ad, which does not mention Republican nominee U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, also seizes on a comment from Bredesen regarding last year’s tax cuts.
“I think they did something which was clever politically, but I couldn’t have swallowed morally, which is I think they threw a few crumbs to the middle class to give these huge breaks to wealthier people and corporations and so on,” Bredesen told The New York Times in April.
The ad claims the tax cuts are saving middle class families $2,000 a year.
“Phil Bredesen is out of touch with Tennessee,” the ad concludes.
In response, Bredesen’s campaign launched its own ad featuring him meeting with Tennessee voters while discussing the nation’s debt.
“It’s a moral issue,” Bredesen, who outlined his proposal to address the national debt in Chattanooga on Tuesday, says in the ad.
Bredesen says in the ad he thinks Congress needs to “get back to basics” and make tough decisions like balancing the budget and making targeted spending cuts, in a manner akin to how he worked as governor.
Bredesen’s campaign said his new ad is “a positive response to the latest false and negative attacks” by Blackburn and outside interest groups like the Senate Leadership Fund and Americans for Prosperity.
Late last month, the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity launched a $2 million ad buy against Bredesen.
Blackburn has also faced scrutiny from out-of-state organizations as well. Last week, a Democrat-aligned PAC launched its own ads against Blackburn.
The involvement of outside interest groups in this year’s race has already begun to face scrutiny.
Last month, Tennessee Citizen Action, a Democratic-aligned nonprofit, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission seizing on comments made by Blackburn’s campaign strategist Ward Baker.
In July, Baker told a group of Republican activists in Nashville that outside groups are “part of your campaign now. And if you don’t treat it that way, then you’re going to lose because that’s just another arm.”
In their complaint, Tennessee Citizen Action allege illegal coordination between Blackburn and the outside groups.
Reach Joel Ebert at jebert@tennessean.com or 615-772-1681 and on Twitter @joelebert29.