High-profile Pa. races go negative

The two most closely watched races for Pennsylvania offices have devolved during the last week into snarling, sniping slugfests on airwaves in the commonwealth. And that can mean only one thing.

Election Day is nigh.

In the last week alone, Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) and his GOP challenger, Tom Smith, both unleashed new attack ads. Meanwhile, Democrat Kathleen Kane and Republican David Freed, running to become state attorney general, continued to duke it out with dueling television spots, each questioning the other's record.

And that's just the candidates' campaigns. Nickel for nickel, none of them can match the last-minute flood of more than $3 million from sophisticated out-of-state political groups hoping to influence the two races before voters head to the polls Tuesday.

Good luck tracing those dollars.

"With all the undisclosed money flooding elections this season, we have less transparency in money and politics than we've had in decades," said Paul S. Ryan, a political money expert for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

Spending by organizations with names like Fight for the Dream and Independence USA have dominated discussion in this year's presidential race, as recent Supreme Court decisions have allowed them to raise and spend unlimited amounts from labor unions, corporations, and individual donors.

And their down-to-the-wire ad buys in Pennsylvania only reflect their next frontier - state-level politics, Ryan said.

Though such super PACs and so-called 527 groups are prohibited from coordinating with specific campaigns, many are not required to identify their donors until after the election.

Casey vs. Smith. Consider the case of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. This GOP-aligned corporate lobbying group blew into Pittsburgh on Thursday, buying up all the remaining ad time to air an attack on Casey.

The chamber's TV ad challenges the senator's votes for President Obama's health-care plan and environmental initiatives, and argues that "Washington has changed Sen. Bob Casey."

The chamber declined to specify how much it spent on the ads and is not required to disclose its donors to the Federal Elections Commission.

But it is only the latest organization to pile on with anti-Casey rhetoric. Recent ads from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Fight for the Dream, a political action committee based in Pennsylvania, also aim to tip the balance to Smith in what recent polls have shown is an ever-tightening race.

The latest Inquirer Pennsylvania Poll, conducted Oct. 23-25, showed Casey with a shrinking seven-point lead over Smith, a retired Armstrong County coal executive.

"Big money and Washington special interests are on Tom Smith's side as big business and tea party groups come to his aid," Casey spokesman Larry Smar said in a statement responding to the Chamber of Commerce ads.

Groups backing the senator, though, have just as much money to spend.

Last week, the Democrat-backing Majority PAC debuted a $515,000 Pittsburgh ad buy criticizing what it called "Tea Party Tom Smith's" plan to eliminate the Department of Education. The bulk of the Washington PAC's funding comes from labor unions.

Within minutes, Smith's campaign shot back, calling it "further evidence of Bob Casey's sputtering campaign."

Freed vs. Kane. The money spent by outside groups in the Senate race may dwarf that shelled out in the contest for state attorney general between Kane and Freed. But the tenor of outside groups' ads in that battle is no less vitriolic.

Polls show Kane, a former Lackawanna County prosecutor, leading by as much as 20 points in her bid to become the first woman and first Democrat elected to the post.

But that didn't stop one generous out-of-state group from giving her an added boost. On Thursday, the super PAC founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg shelled out $600,000 for spots in the Philadelphia media market that challenge Freed's commitment to gun control and cast him as a friend of the National Rifle Association. The ads call the Cumberland County district attorney "good for the NRA, wrong for us."

Freed's campaign manager, Tim Kelly, has said the ads amount to nothing more than hypocrisy. That's a label Freed knows well, having endured a barrage of criticism in response to what has become one of the most controversial attack ads aired in Pennsylvania this year.

The Republican State Leadership Committee in Virginia aired $500,000 worth of ads in September calling Kane "soft on rape." Intoning over images of a young girl being abducted by a man in a white van, the announcer cited the case of a 16-year-old whose rapist received a plea deal.

Within hours of the ad's release, the nonpartisan FactCheck.org dubbed it "one of the most blatantly false attack ads of the political season." The group noted that Kane had little to do with the case in question, and within five days the committee had pulled it from the air.

Yet the ad has lived on as a campaign issue. Kane slammed Freed for failing to immediately denounce the attack. Freed has acknowledged the spots hurt him more than they helped.

And since then, no other outside group has bought ad time to attack Kane. That hasn't stopped Freed, though.

Last week, he launched an Internet-only spot questioning 15 past parking tickets that Kane had had dismissed.

Yes, you read that right. Two days before the election, it's come down to parking tickets.