Two days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee was forced to pull footage from a television ad in the New York 9th Congressional District special election that showed a Bob Turner plane flying low over the Manhattan skyline.
However, a press release from the Turner campaign Friday morning says the ad is in fact still on the air in its unedited version, and “has been running all morning on New York City television stations.” Campaign spokesperson William O’Reilly sends over this screenshot of the ad running on Fox, during a 9/11 special:
The ad, seen as offensive for the memories it evoked of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center a decade ago, has been removed from YouTube and replaced with an edited version.
A DCCC spokesman told the New York Post that they “made a small tweak to remove the brief image of the skyline,” so as to not distract from the point of the ad which, Politico reports, is “That Republican Bob Turner hasn’t met a corporate tax loophole he didn’t like while pushing drastic cuts to Social Security and Medicare.”
The reference is to a comment Turner made in a debate with his Democratic opponent, David Weprin, on Tuesday: “I never met a tax loophole I didn’t like.”
The ad is part of a half-a-million dollar ad buy by the DCCC to help their candidate in the final days of what has turned out to be a surprisingly competitive special election. Democrats have good reason to be worried — according to a Siena poll released Friday, Turner leads Weprin by six points.
The special election will be held on Tuesday, September 13.