Progress Illinois

As Capitol Fax noted today, 14th District GOP congressional candidate Jim Oberweis appears to have violated his pledge to run a positive campaign with a new negative ad hitting Rep. Bill Foster for his votes on the Wall Street bailout package.  Also of note is a new two-minute radio ad he's running on WLS (and perhaps elsewhere).  The spot is narrated by Oberweis himself, who criticizes the bailout at length while never mentioning Foster's name.  What's interesting is this passage:

OBERWEIS: This plan is a product of everything that's wrong with Washington: the special interest lobbyists, the campaign contributions to favored members of the key committees, the rush to action with too little consideration of alternatives or consequence.  This bailout plan doesn't represent change, it represents more of the same.  

Sound familiar?

Read the full script below:

Wall Street is in crisis and Washington's solution just isn't working.  This is Jim Oberweis and I've got some thoughts on that. 

Congress responded to the financial crisis by passing a plan that will bail out Wall Street bankers by passing the cost of their mistakes on to you.  When it was introduced, the plan was a three-page outline.  By the time it was passed two weeks later it had grown to 451 pages, loaded with special interest giveaways.  This plan leaves taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion so the Treasury Department can deliberately buy bad assets at above-market prices.  I have serious doubts that this plan will work and I'm not the only one. Two hundred of the nation's leading economists warned Congress against this bill. In fact, the week after this bill passed was the stock market's worse week ever. 

This plan never should have passed, but it did. And that's proof of what I've been saying throughout this whole campaign: Washington is broken.  This plan is a product of everything that's wrong with Washington: the special interest lobbyists, the campaign contributions to favored members of the key committees, the rush to action with too little consideration of alternatives or consequence.  This bailout plan doesn't represent change, it represents more of the same. 

The next Congress is going to have to deal with a very tough economy.  I know what it's like to deal with a tough economy.  Twenty years ago, after market crashed in 1987, I lost everything.  But with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, I was able to rebuild my businesses.  And since then I've been able to create thousands of jobs right here in Illinois and help protect the investments of tens of thousands of clients.  They let our firm handle their money because they knew we treated it with respect, as if were our own. 

Wouldn't it be nice if Congress treated your money with the same kind of respect.  Send me to Congress and I'll fight to make sure it does.  This is Jim Oberweis and I approve this message.  Thanks for listening.