Illinois Rep. Tammy Duckworth has scored a major endorsement for her senatorial campaign – former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Last week, incumbent Republican Senator Mark Kirk
ramped up his attacks against Duckworth for calling on the U.S. to accept 200,000 refugees from Syria – “20 times more” than President Obama.
Unfortunately for Kirk, his attacks backfired almost immediately. First,
VoteVets Action Fund, a non-profit group, launched a $600,000 attack campaign against Kirk. Now, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is joining the battle against Kirk, fighting for team Duckworth.
Madeleine Albright: Kirk’s Attack “Is Pure Demagoguery”
Albright first highlights
Duckworth’s experience as a veteran, and says that her experience means she has “a very good plan for how we deal with the greatest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II” – the Syrian refugee crisis.
Over a montage of children playing in dilapidated refugee camps and images of refugees trekking through the desert, we hear Albright say that Syrian refugees are not dangerous, but are simply “people who want to make their life somewhere else.” Duckworth often makes
the same case.
Albright goes on to dismiss Kirk’s recent attack ad as “pure demagoguery operating on the basis of the fear factor” – the same “fear factor” that led the U.S. to the Iraq War, which Albright calls “one of the biggest mistakes this country made.”
Is Mark Kirk the Most Endangered Republican in 2016?
Duckworth still has two Democratic opponents in the Illinois senatorial election –
Napoleon Harris and
Andrea Zopp – but she maintains a commanding lead over them. She is also
polling slightly ahead of Kirk in a head-to-head matchup.
The Illinois Democratic primary election is March 1and Duckworth has already snagged the endorsements of EMILY’s List, the Illinois AFL-CIO and SEIU and Hillary Clinton.
With Madeleine Albright added to that prestigious list, Duckworth has more firepower moving into the primary, and most likely into the general election.
