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Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Raul Martinez have spent the last month getting down in the muck, each trying to paint their opponent as the biggest slimeball in the race.
But the elder Diaz-Balart has pulled out all the stops in his latest ad, which revisits Martinez’s scuffle on camera with a protester in June 1999.
In the grainy footage, made all the more disturbing by the ad’s slow-mo, faded color take, Martinez punches a man in the crowd after his police chief was hit in the head with a rock. You can read all about it in Francisco Alvarado’s cover piece on the race.
Charges against Martinez over the incident were dropped, but you wouldn’t know that from the ad.
“Physically assaulting a defenseless young man, then lying about it,” a woman’s frightened-sounding voice intones. “Threatening lives, disrespecting women, appalling behavior … Horrifying.”
This isn’t exactly the first time this campaign has devolved into mudwrestling, and with the polls still dangerously close for the incumbent, it’s not going to be the last time.
Will we see the “Daisy Girl” or the “Willie Horton” ad of South Florida politics before this one is all said and done? Hey, we’ve still got two weeks.
