After bumpy stretch, Senate candidate Angle brings in more help to hone campaign message

Nevada’s Angle brings in help after tough stretch

LOS ANGELES — Nevada U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle enlisted another seasoned political operative Tuesday to help steady a campaign that has been slowed by growing pains and missteps, including some of her own making.

The staff move was announced on the same day Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid began a fresh round of TV ads criticizing Angle as an extremist. Angle’s campaign responded swiftly with a statement blaming Reid for Nevada’s dismal economy, a sign the campaign is taking on a new urgency in a race that is considered wide open.

Jarrod Agen, a veteran of Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, was appointed communications director, one of several recent hires aimed at honing Angle’s message and keeping pace with a barrage of negative ads from Reid and his Democratic allies.

Angle was a come-from-behind winner in the June 8 primary, and the former Reno legislator was slow to expand from a mom-and-pop operation to a multimillion-dollar campaign capable of going punch-for-punch with Reid, who intends to raise $25 million for the contest. However, she surprised Democrats by raising more money than Reid between April and June, though Reid has more money in the bank, $9 million to her $1.8 million.

Recent polls show the race is a dead heat. Reid has been trying to frame Angle as a fringe conservative who would dismantle Social Security and Medicare, while Angle has been blaming Reid for the state’s ailing economy and accuses him of being out of touch with problems at home. The state leads the nation in joblessness, foreclosures and bankruptcies.

Since winning the primary, Angle has granted most of her interviews to conservative media outlets. She says her public schedule is being driven by the need to raise money and she gets the best return for her time on conservative programs, which drive up donations.

“The whole point of an interview is to … earn something with it and I’m not going to earn anything from people who are there to badger me and use my words to batter me with,” she told Christian Broadcasting Network last month.

On Monday she told Fox News, “We needed to have the press be our friend. … We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported.”

Last month she was forced to backtrack after referring to a $20 billion victims’ compensation fund for the Gulf oil spill as a “slush fund.” Reid’s new ad faults her for denouncing the fund, as well as saying in interviews she would eliminate federal environmental and energy agencies.

“Just too extreme,” a narrator says in the ad.

Angle’s campaign said Reid is “spending millions on desperate attacks trying to distract from how his economic record has destroyed the Nevada economy.”

The campaign said the Obama Administration failed to properly oversee BP and “the administration and BP need to be held fully accountable for the mistakes they made.”