Some background on the ‘Hail, Mary’ pass against those godless Democratic fund-raisers

When Karen Handel formally announced her team this week, the name of campaign manager Marty Ryall was at the top, of course.

Ryall’s brief bio was forthright enough to include the fact that he had managed the unsuccessful re-election bid of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.).

The most controversial move in that 2008 race was a decision by the Dole campaign to launch two 30-second ads that criticized Democrat Kay Hagan for attending a fund-raiser hosted by two atheists.

The first ended with a female voiceover declaring, “There is no God.” Which many interpreted as an attempt to put words in Hagan’s mouth — the Democrat never said that.

Ryall explained the entire episode — he called it “our Hail, Mary pass” — just last month in an article written for Politics magazine. Two more members of Handel’s campaign team, spokesman Dan McLagan and TV specialist Fred Davis, were on Dole’s squad at the time and helped make the call.

Wrote Ryall:

We were on a losing trajectory and we had to change the topic of discussion. The only option we had that could accomplish that was an ad on the Godless Americans PAC issue.

We had polled the issue in mid-September and found that it tested very well among the key groups that we needed to win. We needed to raise intensity among Republican voters, as well as shift the focus of Independents and conservative Democrats from our negatives to Kay Hagan in an unfavorable way. We needed something that had some shock value and would also generate an earned media component—and that was the “Godless” issue.

….The first draft of the “Godless” ad had a picture of Kay Hagan at the end with a graphic that read “What was she thinking?” and a voiceover that said “There is no God.” I objected to that because it looked like we were answering the question for her, and that she was thinking there is no God. The group agreed. The next version dropped the graphic, but still had the voice saying, “There is no God.” The voice in the ad is the executive director of the Godless American’s PAC on a TV appearance with Bill O’Reilly.

It was never an attempt to fake Kay Hagan’s voice, or imply that she thinks there is no God. The intention was to provide an exclamation to the ad, showing how radical this group is. In hindsight, that voiceover should not have been in the ad. It gave her another avenue of counter-attack to discredit it.

Just another sign of how rough this GOP primary — and if Handel has her way, general election — is likely to be.

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