Neel Kashkari, the Republican candidate for California governor, is out with a new ad attacking incumbent Gov. Jerry Brown’s record on education. He has chosen to represent Brown’s alleged “betrayal” of the Golden State’s kids with a tasteful visual metaphor: a child drowning in a swimming pool.
With three weeks to go until election day, Kashkari is running far behind Brown. Most polls have found him trailing by at least 20 points for months against the generally popular Democratic governor. It’s hardly Kashkari’s first desperate-ish PR move: in the spring, he ran an ad in which he smashed a toy train in half with an ax to represent his opposition to California’s bullet train project.
In July, a camera crew trailed him for a week as he attempted to live on $40 as a homeless person. And in August, Kashkari made a campaign issue out of a ruling that the nosebleed-causing emissions from the Southern California Sriracha hot-sauce factory were a “public nuisance.”
RT if you’re tired of gov’t regulations killing jobs. I stand with Sriracha against big gov’t. http://t.co/YXtse0IvOi pic.twitter.com/0xVKsMvq7T
— Neel Kashkari (@neelkashkari) April 19, 2014
But Kashkari’s latest spot makes Texas gubernatorial hopeful Wendy Davis’ controversial “wheelchair” ad look downright subtle. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the ad was produced by Something Else Strategies, which has made spots this election cycle for Republican Senate candidates like Iowa’s Jodi “I grew up castrating hogs” Ernst.
