Once you serve a term in elected office, you have a record.
U.S. Rep. Diane Black is learning that can be a double-edged sword, and for the first time in more than 65 years that may not be what Tennessee voters are looking for in a resume for governor.
The Gallatin Republican used her office to her advantage in the first television advertisement promoting her primary campaign. In it, a wall-mounted television in the background of a hospital shows footage of President Trump calling forth the congresswoman last December following his signing of a tax cut bill that she helped author.
The implication couldn’t be clearer – that Black is an intimate of the president, who is popular in the state. But, she says, she didn’t help write the bill for the president but for the nurse who is passing by the camera in the ad. The spot then launches into a mini-biography of Black as a former nurse and onetime single mother who faced the same struggles as the viewer is expected to assume the nurse does today.
In her second advertisement, she is driving a car as she excoriates the practice of human trafficking and explains how as governor she would make ending it in the state a priority.