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By Karoun Demirjian (contact) 
Sunday, July 8, 2012 | 2 a.m.
Editor’s note: Line of Attack is a feature that will run each week until the Nov. 6 election. In Line of Attack, we will parse a political attack, looking at the strategy behind it, how the campaign is delivering it and what facts support or refute it. We’ll assign it a rating on the fairness meter: Legit, Eye Roll, Guffaw, Laughable or Outrageous.
Attack: Nevada Senate candidate Shelley Berkley thinks the federal government helped rescue Nevada with the stimulus – but “do you feel rescued?”
Method of delivery: Packaged by a political advocacy group and brought to you via television broadcast and the online radio site Pandora. Americans for Prosperity, the force behind this ad attacking Berkley, is a familiar face at the conservative family table. The group’s widely credited with launching the Republicans to major victories in 2010.
AFP dug back into that cycle for the hook of this ad: July 2009 footage of a crop-haired Berkley on the House floor, praising the stimulus for providing “extraordinary benefits” to Nevadans and the federal government for coming “to our rescue.”
A concerned woman’s voiceover then goes on to accuse Berkley of voting for “more wasteful spending and higher taxes” and quotes stats about foreclosures and unemployment.
Strategy: For Republicans, the stimulus is like Old Faithful, the most iconic evidence there is of “big government spending.” It gets their party faithful riled up and ready to run some Democrats out of office. The ad attempts to tie Berkley to that narrative, and make the voter think her stimulus-happy ways are what has kept Nevada in the economic dumps.
Fairness meter: Berkley did vote for the stimulus and was pretty vocal about her support for it. She also never came out to partially criticize it the way she has with the Affordable Care Act, so digging up the old footage is fair play.
To get to the bottom of the rest of it, you have to wade into the most festering economic swampland of this election cycle: Did the Keynesian stimulus help, or was it just throwing good money after bad?
Did the stimulus, by paying to keep teachers, public safety officials, and construction workers working for two years, help the economy from slumping worse than it did, or not? On the flip side, would cutting government spending create the jobs AFP says Nevada needed instead of the stimulus?
The economist’s answer would be the stimulus made things “less worse” in the short term, but that in the long term, unchecked debt will hamper job growth and stabilization.
But this is politics. And since you can’t prove an economic alternative that didn’t happen, shots like this are going to come fast and cheap.
All in all, it’s Legit on the politics, but it's an Eye Roll on the math.
Berkley should be running on the Stimulus but she is not - why because it fail
The biggest trial of the Keynesian spend your way out of recession with temporary Union public Jobs failed
Underemployment is at 24% and growth is under 2%
So of course Republicans should point out the Keynesian failure and reject Obama' and Berkly's attempt to do it again
I notice Demirijan coveniently omits the bail-outs and crony capitalism which was really at the heart of the "stimulous." It was an end run to pay-off supporters of Osama Obama and, boy, did it! In a big way! Picking & choosing winners and losers by politicians is a blot on our society and should be illegal, regardless of party or political leanings. That's not exactly what taxpayers expect their confiscated dollars to pay for. As for whether or not the "stimulous" is a "legit" avenue for anyone to question? That's a "no-brainer." All policy and all spending is "legit" to go after.
Shelley Berkley falls in line with the tax and spend people. I say people and not Democrats because all Democrats are not tax and spend. She also appears to have made some underhanded moves to make sure her husband continues to reap financial success. That and the fact that neither she or Harry have done much for Nevada to get us out of this poor economic situation. IF the attacks are legit then let em fly.
Shelley Berkley signed onto legislation which has transferred trillions of dollars out of the pockets of savers and into the very hands of the people who created the 2008 crash, the Bankers. She is an accessory to Bank Robbery.
The ads are juvenile in their simplicity. If the real Truth would be told I rather think debating the merit of what is a softball commercial hardly merits coverage in the LV Sun.
Can anyone point out when Keynesian economics actually worked? Didn't work for FDR. Didn't work for Obama either.
Berkley supported the stimulas package and should be held accountable for it.
And, BTW, didn't we have to borrow 40% of it from the Chinese in the first place?
Reagan spent trillions on the military, did that work? and if the new deal spending did not work, then the WWII spending did. Spending is spending and it works if it is done here.
Bush spent a trillion dollars on the Iraq nation building (Berkeley voted for that too) and that worked. So Spend in Afghanistan, Iraq and that is great, but not here?
Its actually fair to attack Berkley for her support of Obamacare when she and her husband will benefit from the bill. Obamacare will raise taxes for every American making $200,000 or more, which Obama failed to mention. Americans across the country are paying for Obamacare now with higher insurance premiums. Berkley has done nothing to improve the economic climate for Nevadans or the country, she has supported Obama 9 trillion dollar spending plan to help on a few Americans while the middle class slowly sink into poverty. We do not need followers, we need leaders who understand the problems and issues facing Americans, not follow the leader along party lines. You represent your fellow voters, not democrat or republican.
Joesph Goebbels- "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Klaus,
Keynesian economics has worked every time it has been used. This would require you to read and I know you are averse to anything except conservative mythology. Keynes merely pointed out that when everyone cuts back to pay off debt everyone ends up suffering as demand crashes. If the public isn't spending and state governments have to meet balanced budget idiocies then who the h*ll do you think is left to spend to restart the economy? Private markets are sitting on trillions of dollars that are not being spent so their whining about lack of profit flies in the face of reality. It is lack of demand that is the problem at the same time our public infrastructure is decaying and real world environmental problems grow worse. Get a clue.
As to Chinese investment in our economy were you also being typically German paranoid when the Japanese were doing so or the British in earlier decades? How about the German investments here? Were you as afraid of them?
The facts are that humans are completely interdependent and whether we invest overseas or others invest here doesn't matter. It increases security as no one wants to lose money they have invested.
Bottom line is that debt is a tool that everyone uses, not a morality play, and the Germans are insane when they conflate the two.