The Cheney visit was mentioned again in today's paper Democrat and Chronicle, and in the Messenger-Post. That latter story is awful for the Kuhl campaign, since it concentrates on a Kuhl vs.the Democrats catfight about whether the visit is a secret.
As usual, where there's bad PR for the Kuhl campaign, campaign manager and son James Kuhl isn't hard to find. James is a central figure in the M-P article. First, he denies that the visit was kept a secret, then he says:
he hadn't formally notified the media of the event "because we were instructed not to confirm the vice president's attendance."
Well, when the VP comes to town for your campaign and you don't issue a press release, you might not be keeping his visit a secret, but you're certainly downplaying it.
You're also leaving yourself open to letting your opponent frame the debate. Every story I've seen on the fundraiser has the cost of tickets and photo-ops front and center, because every story starts with the Massa campaign press release. If the Kuhl campaign had issued a release about Cheney's visit first, they'd be able to frame the fundraiser in a more positive light. Because Cheney is such a polarizing figure, that positive spin might not have stuck, but at least the first stories would not have been based solely on the words of Kuhl's opponent.
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