The national Republican Party and a pair of newly organized conservative operations are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads against Democratic Rep. Frank Kratovil in the increasingly negative fight for Maryland's easternmost House district.
Republican challenger Andy Harris, a veteran state lawmaker from Baltimore's northern suburbs, is again opposing Kratovil, an endangered Democratic freshman from the Eastern Shore. The House Democratic campaign committee was the first to enter the general election with attack ads aimed at district voters.
Now the other side is retaliating and tilting the air war advantage in the Republican's favor. The latest ads mark the emergence in Maryland of the biggest new trend in American politics: unfettered spending by corporations, labor unions and other outside groups.
The national Republican Party's House campaign arm, in a 30-second TV ad, criticizes Kratovil's support for the unpopular federal stimulus program. The committee says it has reserved more than $532,000 in advertising time to help Harris, who narrowly lost to Kratovil in 2008.
The attack themes of the Harris campaign are echoed in the new ads by the national party and two outside groups operating under recent federal court rulings that opened the way for unlimited spending in federal elections. All have chimed in with commercials portraying Kratovil as a puppet of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Harris and the Maryland Republican Party are also tying Kratovil to the Baltimore-born Pelosi, whose liberal politics have made her an election-year target for conservative candidates and their backers.
A Harris spokeswoman said the Republican challenger had no contact with the outside ad campaigns, which by law must be independent of his campaign.
The spending by outside groups "shows once again the importance of the race and the negative impact that Nancy Pelosi and Frank Kratovil have on this county," said Harris campaign press secretary Anna Nix.
An obscure Washington-based group, the Commission on Hope, Growth & Opportunity, is spending $270,000 for a saturation buy this week of an ad attacking Kratovil, according to the Democrat's campaign. The tax-exempt operation is run by Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal by Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard magazine.
Reed did not return phone calls. A lawyer for the entity, Bill Canfield, said it would disclose its sources of income after the election, as allowed by Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, under which it was organized.
A second group, Concerned Taxpayers of America, reported to the Federal Election Commission last month that it intended to raise "unlimited amounts" for campaign-related expenditures under a federal court ruling this year that allowed independent groups to raise and spend political money without limit. That ruling followed a Supreme Court opinion in the Citizens United case that established a constitutional right for corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts on federal campaigns.
Concerned Taxpayers is run out of a Capitol Hill townhouse by Jason Miller, a Republican campaign consultant, according to news accounts. The group has already spent $46,970 on ads opposing Kratovil, it said in a recent FEC filing.
Its initial ad features a cartoon chorus line that includes caricatures of Kratovil, Pelosi and President Barack Obama. The organization has not disclosed its donors and could not be reached for comment.
"These outside groups that don't have to disclose their sources of money are running misleading attacks in an attempt to mislead the voters," said Kratovil campaign manager Jessica Klonsky. "They're simply trying to twist the facts around to help Andy Harris."
In all, spending against Kratovil by groups other than Harris' campaign — about $850,000 in all — appears to more than compensate for the Democrat's earlier funding advantage.
Harris, whose candidacy is benefiting from generous support by his fellow anesthesiologists, announced late Monday that he raised more than a half-million dollars in the three-month period ending Sept. 30 and has about $820,000 in the bank. Kratovil's campaign declined to release financial figures ahead of the Oct. 15 disclosure deadline.
The new anti-Kratovil spot by national Republicans, airing in the Salisbury market on broadcast TV and running on cable in the Baltimore market, attempts to undermine the central theme of the congressman's candidacy: a claim of political independence, backed up by nonpartisan studies of votes during his first year in office.
The Republican ad criticizes Kratovil for backing Pelosi for House speaker. The ad does not explain that votes for speaker routinely follow party lines and that only Republicans voted against making her speaker.
The anti-Kratovil ad also describes the stimulus as "failed," an assessment at odds with the judgment of many economists. According to an August report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus helped pull the nation out of the deepest recession since the Depression and provided jobs to between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people nationwide.
Kratovil voted against the stimulus the first time it went through the House in 2009, then approved the revised version. He has made public appearances in the district to highlight projects funded by the $814 billion spending measure.
Kratovil's campaign said Republicans are using a Washington Post vote study that showed Kratovil voting with Pelosi 84 percent of the time, including on noncontroversial issues. By that yardstick, Kratovil voted with Republican Leader John Boehner 60 percent of the time, the Democrat's campaign said.
Kratovil prefers to cite the ratings of two respected Washington-based publications. Congressional Quarterly ranked the Eastern Shore congressman as the tenth most independent House member, and National Journal placed him right-of-center in terms of ideology.
paul.west@baltsun.com