Ad #6: No Surprise
by
Ken Salazar for U.S. Senate
Salazar ads say Coors 'out of touch'
By Jim Tankersley, Rocky Mountain News
September 29, 2004
Ken Salazar has launched a harsh attack on Pete Coors, his opponent in Colorado's U.S. Senate race.
Salazar, a Democrat and the state attorney general, accuses the Republican brewery executive of being out of touch with the "common man" in radio and television advertisements now airing.
The Coors campaign calls them "a smear tactic" and says Salazar is "playing loose with the truth."
Coors shares the concerns of ordinary Coloradans, said his spokeswoman, Cinamon Watson.
She called the ads "a reckless thing to do, particularly for someone who's been so been adamant about positive campaigning."
Salazar's campaign manager, Jim Carpenter, defended the ads as fairly contrasting Coors' family fortune and Salazar's rural ranching upbringing.
"This is a man and his family who have worked very hard," Carpenter said of Salazar, "and they understand the struggle that families go through. Pete Coors has had a very different background."
The television ad says Coors, a multimillionaire, "can't understand that middle class families are struggling."
The radio spot accuses him of promising "trillions of dollars in new spending that would deepen the deficit."
It raps Coors for pushing tax breaks for "millionaires and big corporations," which would benefit him personally, and for defending those policies by saying, "I don't think there's anything wrong with being self-serving" - which he said in a Rocky Mountain News interview earlier this month.
Both ads quote Coors saying, at a debate earlier this month, "I don't know what a common man is."
The Coors campaign and the League of Women Voters, an impartial group that sponsored the debate, say that's taken out of context.
A transcript from the debate shows the remark came when Coors defended himself against Salazar's charges of not being a common man.
"I don't know what a common man is," Coors said. "A common man is somebody who lives in this country that works hard to provide jobs for others, who works, either providing for others or working for someone else. I've done both."
