New Rossi ad calls Gregoire "desperate"

In the grudge match between Gov. Chris Gregoire and Dino Rossi, the two are punching, elbowing and kicking one another as if the UFC title is on the line.

And it’s only July.

Today, Rossi, who prefers GOP to Republican, started airing a new radio commercial statewide lambasting the Democratic Gregoire. In it, he does nearly all the speaking.

He delivers a little attitude when he says he’s running for governor “to start fixing some problems (pause) for a change.”

(This line is repeated at the end of the ad. I suspect the campaign will be making calls soon to measure whether anyone who hears the ad remembers those words.. If so, “fixing some problems” may emerge as a theme around which he campaigns.)

Here’s the good stuff:

“The incumbent must be getting pretty desperate this summer because her very first ads are attacks on me that just aren’t true. They’re so desperate that they even attacked my Italian last name.”

That’s a reference to the state Democratic Party’s use of the theme song for The Sopranos as the soundtrack of an online video smacking Rossi. The party changed the music after the Italian Club in Seattle and others slammed use of the song as offensive and ethnic stereotyping.

Even the leader of the group that wrote the song wasn’t happy about it.

Larry Love of Alabama 3 recently said:

“If any political parties want to carry out tawdry campaigning utilizing radical political music, A3 suggest they check out the following: Alabama, The Charlie Daniels Band and Ted Nugent. We like to keep it underground. We make pop music for intelligent people, not politicians.”

Thanks to my colleague Justin Arnold for sending me this link for more of Love’s comments.

UPDATE:

Just received this comment from the Gregoire campaign:

“Republican Dino Rossi is playing damage control and trying to hide from his George Bush record of cutting kids off of healthcare and opposing stem cell research.”

Here’s a good place to note that Gregoire’s latest ad is all about linking Rossi with Bush on social and environmental issues.