A Tucson construction worker is featured in a new TV ad from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that once again tells voters that Republican Jesse Kelly will not protect Medicare.
The message is the same one Democrats have been hammering home all campaign, but the style of ad is much different. Whereas past ads featured clips of Kelly himself making comments about Social Security and Medicare, this piece is entirely about Tucson construction worker Noel Hatfield..
If features video of Hatfield getting ready at home and driving to the worksite, and includes him talking about Kelly’s plan.
“I got my first construction job when I was 15 years old, been paying into Medicare every paycheck since then, for over the last 37-plus years,” he says. “Jesse Kelly said that over time he’s going to get rid of Medicare. I don’t think it’s right for Jesse Kelly and people to decide that I don’t get my Medicare that I’ve been paying for.”
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Kelly is facing off against Democrat Ron Barber in the June 12 special election to complete the Congressional term of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
The ad again misleads voters about what Kelly said in 2010, Kelly’s spokesman John Ellinwood said.
“Jesse Kelly has always supported full payments of benefits for everyone who has paid into Medicare,” Ellinwood said. “The ad is false.”
In an often-cited 2009 interview with the Tucson Weekly, Kelly said the country needs to find ways to reform and privatize Social Security and Medicare in the future. But, he also says that people that have “worked their tails off their whole lives” have earned the benefits and that the country shouldn’t cut it now.
In that same 2009 interview, Kelly also said he would love to eliminate the program, take steps to let people opt out, and privatize it.
His opinion now on privatization — whether to offer younger workers an option of putting a portion of their contribution into personal retirement accounts — remains unclear. A paragraph on his website advocating that option was removed mid-campaign.
But he reiterated support for that option at a press conference last month:
"Maybe you put half of your payroll taxes in a personal account so the government can't touch it," Kelly said.
Americans should be able to decide if they want Social Security and Medicare in the future, he said that day.
"The American people have always been able to make better decisions for themselves than the government forcing a decision on them," Kelly said.
Asked if that would be a private system, he said it's a system of "American people choosing what they want."
Democrats say Kelly’s support from the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. shows that he supports privatization of Social Security.
In 2011, Sessions (whose Pac donated $10,000 to Kelly’s campaign) introduced a bill that would have given workers an option of having 6.2 percent of their wages sent to a "SAFE" account each year instead of the Social Security. Blackburn, who came to Tucson recently to host a fund-raiser for Kelly, was a co-sponsor of the bill.
“Tea Party candidate Jesse Kelly can no longer cover up his support for privatizing Social Security as he brings in Washington Republicans pushing that plan to fill his campaign coffers,” said Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in an email sent out recently.
Outside spending has been big in this race, with $1.5 million spent through May 23, most of which has been on TV ads. All told, there has been $1.056 million spent by outside groups backing Kelly, and nearly $470,000 backing Barber.
Stay tuned to the Pueblo Politics blog throughout 2012 for news, updates and information about Arizona politics. You can follow Arizona Daily Star reporter Brady McCombs on Twitter by clicking on his name.
