NE senate race: antigay Nebraska AG Jon Bruning vs. gay-friendly Bob Kerrey: Bruning now using 'Willie Horton' political consultant

Right-wing Nebraska AG Jon Bruning will has retained D.C.-based McCarthy-Hennings Media, as the website Nebraska Watchdog first reported.
     The "McCarthy" in that corporate name refers to adman Larry McCarthy, whose resume includes the 1988 Willie Horton attack ad against Michael Dukakis during George H.W. Bush's campaign for president.
     McCarthy played xenophobia and religious divisions in the electorate like a violin in more recent political spots like "Chinese Professor" and "Mosque."
     Bruning, for his part, has compared welfare recipients to raccoons scavenging for food.

"The raccoons, they're not stupid, they're going to do the easy way if we make it easy for them -- just like welfare recipients all across America," he said in a video recorded by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic independent expenditure group. "If we don't send them to work, they're going to take the easy way out."

     ..."What better way to reform your image as a politician who makes racially insensitive comments than to hire the ad firm that makes racially insensitive ads?" said Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge 21st Century. 

     In November 2003, Bruning said Massachusetts' Supreme Court ruling against that state's ban on gay marriages was ridiculous. "Does that mean you have to allow a man to marry his pet, or a man to marry his chair?" Bruning said. "I mean, at some point, it needs to stop." [Associated Press, 11/18/03]

     In 1982, Bob Kerrey, then on the Human Rights Commission in Lincoln, supported an equal employment measure for gay citizens before voters overturned it amid a rumor campaign fueled by a subsequently discredited NU psychologist Paul Cameron.
     From 2007 to 2011, a period in which many Americans lost their life savings, Bruning tripled the value of his personal non-publicly traded assets, from a range of $4.3 to $17.8 million to $12.6 to $61.3 million while in office as Nebraska Attorney General and has held positions while AG on 24 different banks, private businesses and LLCs.
     Below, Joe Jordon, of Nebraska Watchdog, talks to AG Bruning about his ties to David Sokol, who abruptly left Berkshire Hathaway amid charges of insider trading and is the target of an ongoing SEC investigation.



Below: then-senator Bob Kerrey took on Charleton Heston and the NRA in an ad for his successful reelection to the US Senate.