Liberal Group Blames Republicans for Ebola in New ad

A liberal political group just played the Ebola card in the midterm elections.

A new ad by the Agenda Project Action Fund, a liberal outside group, opens with a line uttered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—”Washington, actually, can cut spending”—and ends with the statement, “Republican cuts kill.”

(PHOTOS: See How A Photographer Is Covering Ebola’s Deadly Spread)

The rest of the one-minute ad is peppered with clips of Republicans asking for cuts, interspersed with top officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health saying the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could have been better handled if their agencies had more funding. NIH head Francis Collins said in an interview published Sunday that an Ebola vaccine might have been developed by now if it were not for a “10-year slide in research support.”

Erica Payne, the producer of the ad and president of the Agenda Project Action Fund, blamed the Ebola crisis wholly on the Republican Party.

“I think any Republican who attempts to chalk this ad up to politics is a Republican who is too afraid to examine the results of his of her actions and the very real consequences that they have,” she said. “They have developed a governing philosophy that is so fanatically anti-investment that they literally have at their doorstop death. There is no exaggeration in this.

“I think that the blame for the situation that we’re in now with the Ebola crisis is 100% the fault of Republicans and their fanatical anti-government philosophy,” she added. “They did this.”

(PHOTOS: Inside the Ebola Crisis: The Images That Moved Them Most)

Conservatives quickly bashed the ad. Erick Erickson, the editor of the conservative website RedState, wrote that the ad “reeks of desperation.”

“It’s a defensive ad that reeks of desperation,” he wrote. “At a time when more and more Americans, including millennials, are concluding government just doesn’t work, it probably won’t be effective.”

The Agenda Project Action Fund says it will spend six figures to run the ad on TV in Kentucky—where McConnell is locked in a tight reelection race—with other potential ad-buys planned in South Dakota, Alaska and North Carolina.