Playing the Corruption Card

April 11, 2006 — -- Democrats will find out today whether their "culture of corruption" message has legs when voters near San Diego choose from among 18 candidates to replace Duke Cunningham, the former Republican congressman who was sentenced last month to more than eight years in prison for taking bribes from defense contractors.

Democrat Francine Busby, a local school board member who ran unsuccessfully against Cunningham in 2004, is widely expected to finish first in today's balloting. With several strong Republicans in the race, the outcome on the GOP side is far from clear. The strongest GOP contenders are former Rep. Brian Bilbray, businessman Eric Roach, former State Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian, and State Sen. Bill Morrow.

Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, predicted last week that Busby could win as much as 44 percent of the vote -- eight points better than her 2004 vote total.

Just finishing first, however, will not be enough for victory. A candidate must receive more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff on June 6. Republican strategists are confident that the party's 44 percent to 30 percent registration advantage will prove decisive in June if Busby doesn't score a surprise win in the first round of voting.

"If she doesn't win Tuesday [today], she's not going to win," the committee's communications director Carl Forti said late last week.

In an effort to "level the playing field" and sully Busby's "clean House" message, the independent expenditure arm of the committee has purchased $300,000 worth of television ads to attack what Reynolds calls Busby's "rather righteous presentation of her campaign and what she was going to do or not do."

The anti-Busby ad implies that the elected trustee of the Cardiff school board violated the terms of her anti-corruption platform by accepting a $500 campaign contribution from former Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., one of the "Keating Five" senators who was admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee in the 1990s for his efforts to aid a troubled savings and loan institution.

"Francine Busby said she's different," the narrator says in the ad. "She said she would end gifts by lobbyists and financial deals with government contractors. Busby said no exceptions. Now we discover Busby has taken thousands of dollars of campaign money from lobbyists and employees of government contractors, including money from a scandal-plagued lobbyist who left Congress after a pay-for-play scandal."

In actuality, the GOP is conflating gifts from lobbyists, which Busby has said she would give up, with campaign contributions, which do not violate the terms of her platform.

"There's a clear distinction between donations and a gift," Alex Knott, the political editor at the Center for Public Integrity, told ABC News. "The fact is that she did not break her pledge."

With the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee injecting more than a couple of hundred thousand dollars into Busby's campaign, the Democratic camp is matching the GOP's ad "point for point" with a television ad in which Busby says: "The Washington insiders are so desperate they're using corrupt money from Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay to attack me."

DeLay has given the Republican committee $835,000 since 1994, and Cunningham has given the committee $643,000 over the course of his career, according to the Democratic committee.

Busby's counterpunch features the March 28, 2006, edition of The Hill newspaper with a headline that reads: "As parting gift, Duke cut check to NRCC." The story reveals how Cunningham sent the Republican committee a $2,000 check from his expiring campaign committee as he was headed to prison on Dec. 13, 2005.

The Republican committee's Forti notes, however, that the ad is misleading because the $2,000 check alluded to in The Hill's headline was never received by the party committee.

If Busby wins or even comes close to winning, national Democrats will herald it as an indication that a political tidal wave akin to the one that carried Republicans to power in 1994 is coming in November. Given that President Bush prevailed over Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in California's 50th congressional district by a ratio of 55 percent to 44 percent less than a year and a half ago, the Democratic committee is already tamping down expectations.

"She has already shaken people's perceptions of the district," said Bill Burton, of the Democratic committee.

ABC News' Dan Nechita and Mike Westling contributed to this report.