"Campaigning for the Senate in 2012, former Harvard law professor cum left-wing populist Elizabeth Warren touched down in North Carolina and told voters, “The game is rigged.”
She was more right than she knew. As it turns out, North Carolina’s Democratic senator was doing some of the rigging. Now, Kay Hagan’s political future may depend on how voters react to the story.
Hagan’s vote for the 2009 stimulus, coupled with revelations that the legislation resulted in taxpayer funding for her family’s businesses, has emerged as an October surprise in a race hitherto marked by her unexpected resilience in a difficult political environment.
The story has received limited attention in local press, but now a Koch-backed free-market group is launching a major TV ad campaign accusing the Hagans of self-dealing.
“Kay Hagan said that the stimulus would help North Carolina — instead it helped the Hagans,” James Davis of Freedom Partners Action Fund told National Review Online. “What voters despise most about Washington is that they aren’t playing by the same set of rules as everyone else. The fact that the Hagan family business received nearly $400,000 taxpayer dollars from the stimulus just reinforces what everyone already suspects. The Hagans got richer and North Carolina paid the price.”
The super PAC plans to spend at least $1 million to bring that message to TV screens across the Tar Heel state, starting next week.
In late September, Politco reported that JDC Manufacturing, a company owned by Hagan’s husband, received almost $400,000 in stimulus grants to help pay for energy-efficiency upgrades. Thereafter, the Carolina Journal reported that Hagan’s husband kept the stimulus money in the family by paying a company he founded with their son to make the upgrades."