Now this is ... interesting: Michelle Nunn's campaign is targeting her opponent for something it already admitted is a problem for her as well.
In an ad titled "Pattern," the Nunn campaign suggests female voters shouldn't be able to trust Republican David Perdue because -- after he left the company -- Dollar General faced employment discrimination lawsuits that overlapped with his time as CEO of the company. "If David Perdue didn't do right by women at his company," the ad's script intones, "why would he do right for Georgia?"
This represents a double helping of chutzpah on the Democrat's part.
First because, as my news-side colleagues noted earlier today, the Dollar General complaints "largely involve disputes with local or regional staffers at stores and don't mention Perdue. Several cite incidents that took place long before his tenure" (emphasis added). Even the specific complaint cited in the ad, which the company settled after Perdue left for almost $19 million, didn't name him. Although PolitiFact Georgia previously found a similar ad by EMILY's List was "mostly true" for referring (in a carefully worded way) to complaints about "a company (Perdue) ran," this ad attaching the blame personally to Perdue merits something closer to "pants on fire."
Second, and maybe even more brazenly, recall the infamous Nunn campaign memo , which was inadvertently made public and was published in July. On its list of "vulnerabilities" for Nunn is a mention of "records related to two EECO (sic) complaints identified by" a research firm helping the campaign. Nothing more is known about these complaints, because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn't make such records available to the public. And it's easier to obtain such documents for a publicly traded company like Dollar General than for a non-profit like the ones Nunn has worked for (although if anyone reading this was involved in the complaint, you certainly could share your copies of any documents with a certain AJC correspondent ... just sayin').
Now, it's understandable if the Nunn campaign would prefer not to talk about this. But then, they're the ones who brought up the subject of employment discrimination even though they knew there were EEOC complaints related to Nunn and/or the organizations she was a part of. As I said: That's pretty brazen.
Like the other gory details in that memo, this episode puts the lie to Nunn's claim to be someone other than a typical Washington politician.
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