AUSTIN — Lieutenant governor hopefuls Dan Patrick and Leticia Van de Putte sought to rally their base voters by launching hard-hitting TV attack ads Wednesday.
Patrick’s spot appeals to economic conservatives — and perhaps, to people worried about their jobs. Meanwhile, his Texas Senate colleague Van de Putte targets women, suggesting Patrick’s an extremist and insensitive to their concerns.
Patrick’s ad slams Van de Putte as “liberal Leticia.” It cherry-picks her votes on tax-related bills going back 11 years, including at least one in which she sided with business groups, while he did not.
“Liberal Leticia opposed property tax cuts, supported a statewide property tax and even supported a tax on employee wages, an income tax on Texas workers,” a narrator says. Patrick then introduces himself as “a conservative who sponsored one of the biggest tax cuts of any state during the recession, helping Texas lead the nation in job creation.” He’ll keep that going, with property tax cuts, he says.
As the recession bit into state revenue, Patrick sponsored a 2009 bill exempting more small businesses from the state franchise tax.
The ad doesn’t mention, though, that Van de Putte also voted for the measure. It reduced revenue over two years by $172.1 million, or three-tenths of 1 percent of general revenue-related receipts the state collected in 2010-11.
One of the bills Patrick’s ad cites to say Van de Putte “opposed property tax cuts” was an unsuccessful Patrick effort in 2007 to reduce the cap on annual growth in appraisals of residential property, to 5 percent, from 10 percent. Van de Putte joined nine other Democrats and 10 Republicans in voting down Patrick’s measure. Business lobbyists have opposed the tighter cap because it would shift the property tax burden away from homeowners and toward commercial and industrial property.
Van de Putte’s ad also loosely interprets a past Patrick vote: his opposition last year to the two-year state budget.
The final vote on the budget can be construed as a vote against everything state government does, though Patrick at the time set out reasons he voted “nay,” such as changes in some education programs and what he felt was insufficient spending on state law enforcement efforts at the Texas-Mexico border.
Van de Putte equates Patrick’s vote against the overall budget with opposition to inclusion of money to pay to test a backlog of 20,000 untested rape kits held by police across the state.
The ad also takes issue with Patrick’s opposition to abortion rights for victims of rape and incest. An actress, playing a rape victim, sheds a tear. The spot omits Patrick’s follow-up explanation in the candidates’ debate, which is that the fetus resulting from such crimes “is still born in the image of God and is still a living, human being.”
Van de Putte, who is a pharmacist, appears wearing a lab coat. “We need to respect women and their families,” she says. “As lieutenant governor, I’ll fight for you.”
Her campaign said the 30-second spot “is part of a multimillion-dollar ad buy across major markets in the state.” Patrick’s camp said his ad, also 30 seconds, “is now running in major markets across Texas.”
On Twitter: @roberttgarrett
