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Washington • Leaked audio in Nevada reveals a Republican Senate candidate trashing her party. Video of a Democratic Senate hopeful wrongly claiming he served in Vietnam becomes a TV ad in Connecticut. A housekeeper steps forward to say her employer, California's GOP gubernatorial nominee, knew she was an undocumented immigrant.
Digging for dirt, political foes are working overtime to surprise rivals with skeletons and other embarrassments, forcing them to defend themselves rather than focus on their closing arguments in the homestretch of critical midterm elections.
Control of Congress and of statehouses nationwide is at stake on Nov. 2, and — behind the scenes or sometimes in plain sight — both Republicans seeking power and Democrats looking to retain it are laboring to unearth and highlight stains in opposing candidates' backgrounds. Both sides are using the material to question candidates' character and trustworthiness, important issues with voters who are already sour on politicians in general.
In one of the latest episodes, GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle in Nevada was recorded criticizing Washington Republicans in a conversation with tea party hopeful Scott Ashjian, whose third-party candidacy threatens to siphon votes from her and help Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid win re-election.
"The Republicans have lost their standards, they've lost their principles. … Really that's why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me. They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government," Angle said, according to a recording that reached the Las Vegas Sun.
Reid's campaign used that to claim "Angle will say or do anything to get elected."
That incident followed a political bombshell that shook the California governor's race last week.
GOP nominee Meg Whitman was forced to answer for employing an illegal immigrant for nine years when the Mexican maid — and her attorney, longtime Democratic supporter Gloria Allred of Los Angeles — stepped forward to claim that Whitman had known about her status since 2003. Whitman disputed that and dismissed the allegations as a baseless stunt engineered by Democratic opponent Jerry Brown.
In Connecticut, Republican Linda McMahon rolled out a TV ad on Monday that showed a 2008 clip of Democratic Senate nominee Richard Blumenthal's now-discredited comment about "the days that I served in Vietnam." The controversy surfaced in the spring, putting a chink in the Democrat's campaign in what some strategists called the opening salvo in the opposition-research wars.
McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive, also is finding herself the target of an unflattering disclosure: media reports of a contract involving her wrestling empire teaming with the company that produces the "Girls Gone Wild" videos and promoting a 2003 "uncensored" pay-per-view spring break special.
There's almost surely more to come.