‘Disgusted with Rand Paul’: Charles Booker has a new ad. Can he get it on TV?
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker has produced a new 60-second advertisement targeting Sen. Rand Paul – but it’s unclear whether it’ll ever be seen on television.
The new advertisement features Marine veteran John Kasey, who is undergoing a new round of chemotherapy to battle hairy cell leukemia that he says was acquired from his time at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
“Honestly, I’m disgusted with Rand Paul,” Kasey says in Booker’s commercial. “Anybody that would say, ‘Hey John, you didn’t really serve, you didn’t get sick because you were in Camp Lejeune,’ it’s insulting.”
It’s unmentioned in the spot, but Booker’s campaign is using Kasey’s story to highlight Paul’s vote against the PACT Act, a bill signed into law this summer by President Joe Biden that expands healthcare access for veterans exposed to toxic substances and burn pits.
Paul was one of 11 senators who voted against the legislation, citing a finite amount of resources and the difficulty with pinpointing which ailments were directly caused by veterans time in service.
“It’s one thing to say, yes, we should take care of people who have an injury related to something that happened in the military, but it’s important to have some kind of link of causation,” Paul explained in August. “It’s confounding, it’s not always easy to make these judgements. If you smoked for 40 years and you have emphysema and you were also exposed to a burn bit, it’s very hard to make the judgement now about causation, about what actually causes this.”
The PACT legislation removes the need for certain veterans and their survivors to prove a direct service connection if they are diagnosed with one of 23 specific conditions.
Paul instead proposed using funds saved by ending the war in Afghanistan to grant a $2,500 bonus to military members who served in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Booker called it evidence that Paul had “blatantly turned his back on our veterans.”
“His shameful vote against The PACT Act was a complete slap in the faces of our loved ones,” Booker said.
A Paul spokesman, Jake Cox, noted that Paul’s office regularly works with veterans who need assistance with the VA.
Right now, the Booker campaign said it would begin airing the ad online, but there’s no evidence it had the resources to place it on television.
According to Kantar, which tracks political ad spending, Booker has made no television reservations for October.
A spokesperson for Booker’s campaign said it was still compiling its advertising plan. Booker last aired a TV advertisement in August.
According to the last federal filing, Paul had $9.2 million still in the bank. Booker had about $900,000 in his campaign account. New financial reports will come out this weekend.
Paul has been on an advertising blitz, with his eighth television spot scheduled to begin running next week. It features a former Daviess County sheriff and lifelong Democrat proclaiming his support for Paul.
This story was originally published October 13, 2022 at 12:19 PM with the headline "‘Disgusted with Rand Paul’: Charles Booker has a new ad. Can he get it on TV?."
