GOP Fires Back At Labor

WASHINGTON (Oct. 25) -- Organized labor opened fire last March, approving a $35 million political campaign to saturate the airwaves with anti-Republican attack ads week after week. The Republicans did not respond at first, and that may have been a mistake.

"The union ads have been devastating," said political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. "(Republican Chairman) Haley Barbour took a gamble, saying we'll wait until people are focusing on the election, the final few weeks."

Now Republicans say they're matching the unions dollar for dollar during October, and are estimated to be spending $8 million to $9 million. "Now, at the end of the campaign, we're in a position to offset to some degree the tens of millions being spent by labor," Barbour said.

The Republican Party ads that are now running attack unions and say, "the big labor bosses in Washington, D.C., have a scheme to buy the Congress." Republicans say these spots work best where unions are least popular.

"That's baloney. Absolute baloney," said one of those "big labor bosses," AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. She says Republican ads are backfiring and making union members mad. "(Union members) are telling us that because of these ads, they want to get active and get their friends and their neighbors and everybody out to vote," Chavez-Thompson said.

Naturally, business sees it differently. Bernadette Budde of the Business-Industry Political Action Committee thinks that labor groups showed their hand too soon.

"You could argue that if Republicans keep control of Congress, it's because organized labor trumpeted its tactics and its targets way too early and it allowed everybody to retaliate and it allowed the Republican freshmen to use the fact that they were threatened to go out and raise money," Budde said.

There's even disagreement on how much labor is spending. The AFL-CIO admits, for example, spending more than $1 million against Portland, Oregon's Jim Bunn, $750,000 against J.D. Hayworth of Phoenix, and $630,000 each against Seattle's Republican freshmen, Randy Tate and Rick White.

But a Republican consulting firm that monitors political ads nationwide says the dollar totals are much higher, up to $1.6 million in Phoenix, for instance. Republican political consultant Robin Roberts says he has seen nothing like it in 20 years of tracking political ads. "They've been some of the... most aggressive, negative ads in the history of politics," Roberts said.

Labor's ads are currently running in 27 House districts. Democrats need to gain only 18 seats to regain control. If Republicans do lose the House, there are sure to be complaints that the Republican counterattack against labor was too little, too late.

This story originally appeared on CNN's "Inside Politics."

GOP Fires Back At Labor

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