In a meeting with reporters on Monday, Republican Senate candidate David Perdue claimed that he is “proud of” his career in outsourcing jobs and blamed Washington policies for his own business decisions. The former CEO of Dollar General, who is running against Democrat Michelle Nunn for Georgia’s open US Senate seat, was answering questions about outsourcing due to a Politico article that ran last week that highlighted comments he made in a deposition in 2005. In the deposition, Perdue said that he had spent most of his career outsourcing jobs.
The Politico article was already a campaign gift for Nunn as it allowed her to hammer Perdue on his business record and paint him as a job killer. However, Perdue’s statement on Monday was like Christmas morning, as it is on video and is practically a ready-made campaign ad. In fact, Nunn’s campaign already has a video clip up on its YouTube page.
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As you can see, Perdue says he doesn’t need to defend his outsourcing past as he’s proud of it. He then proceeds to blame government for his personal business decisions.
“Defend it? I’m proud of it. This is a part of American business, part of any business. Outsourcing is the procurement of products and services to help your business run. People do that all day.
I think the issue that people get confused about is the loss of jobs. This is because of bad government policies: tax policy, regulation, even compliance requirements. It puts us at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world. Even today, right now this administration has policies going on that are decimating industries today.”
Perdue just gave Nunn’s campaign all of the negative advertising it will need in the stretch run to the election. His comments are going to be put on blast these next four weeks and might very well swing the election towards the Democrat. Polls have shown this race to be super-tight. However, Perdue has been up in the majority of the recent polls, but just barely. His average lead in recent polls is right around the margin of error.
These statements regarding outsourcing of jobs may just well be Perdue’s ‘47%’ and completely sink his campaign. No matter how he spins it, or tries to justify his business decisions as necessary and smart, it is going to be increasingly difficult for him to connect with working-class voters at this point. They are going to see him saying he is proud of his decisions to ship jobs overseas and tune him out at that moment. Just like Mitt Romney, his real character has been exposed, and voters now see that he is an out-of-touch millionaire who just doesn’t care about the average American.
Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).
