New pro-Tillis ad hits Hagan on ISIS
Republican Senate candidate Thom Tillis has a new statewide TV ad out on Friday featuring a North Carolina woman who’s a veteran, military wife and mother of two Marines criticizing President Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, over foreign policy.
It follows another recent Tillis commercial that also accused Hagan, his Democratic opponent, of not paying attention to the rise of the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria.
In the new ad, Nancy Anderson of Union County say: “It makes me so made to see how the president’s weakness has allowed the Islamic State to grow. And Sen. Hagan? She just goes right along with him.” Then Anderson looks into the camera and says: “We can’t let our kids die in vain. We have to change our senator.”
The scope of the ad buy was not immediately known but the Tillis campaign told Roll Call that it will rotate with the other ISIS ad as part of its fall ad buy.
According to the Tillis campaign, Anderson is a retired lieutenant colonel who served as a nurse in the U.S. Air Force and Air Force Reserve from 1978 to 1998. She was activated in the 1990-91 Gulf War over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but did not end up going to the war before it ended. Her husband is a retired Air Force Major. The Andersons have two sons in the Marines, one who served in Iraq and another who is serving in Afghanistan now.
The Hagan campaign responded Friday with comments from Donna Cheek, a North Carolina military wife whose husband deployed six tims, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and now is a full-time reservist in the Air Force.
“As a military spouse, I trust Kay to represent the best interests of my family and all military families. Because she comes from a strong military family and has two nephews on active duty, she understands what it’s like to worry about a loved one who is halfway across the world in a dangerous place. Kay’s clear and decisive action on how to combat ISIS is one of the most important things for military families like mine. Speaker Tillis doesn’t even think our service members and military families deserve to know his position, and it is upsetting that he will play politics with our fears without being straight about his positions.”
Hagan voted for a bill, which passed with bipartisan support, that will train and equip moderate Syrian rebels.
Tillis recently said he didn’t know whether those rebels should be armed, because of the danger of weapons falling into the wrong hands.
Hagan also has said she supports the air strikes that are now under way in the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State.
This story was originally published October 3, 2014 at 12:00 PM.