The Club for Growth appears to have learned from the Russians.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Russian intelligence operatives sometimes pretended to be American progressives as they used social media to make people question their own strongly held beliefs.

So it now goes for the Club for Growth, which typically criticizes former President Barack Obama but in a new ad heralds him as a “progressive champion” who sought to “combat inequality and harmful stereotypes.”

Why is the conservative, “limited-government” interest group, one of the most determined opponents of Obamacare, now praising Obama? Because it’s directing its latest spot at progressives in hopes of sabotaging former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who’s expected to announce a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination any day.

Club for Growth president David McIntosh says his group is targeting O’Rourke for an obvious reason: the 46-year-old politician is polling well in swing states and could put Texas, a reliably GOP state, “in play” in 2020. Politico magazine says the attack ad is part of “a broader campaign [by Republicans] to meddle in the opposing party’s contest to take on President Donald Trump.”

Whether this anti-O’Rourke ad counts as “meddling” is debatable, but it definitely hits hard.

“Beto O’Rourke’s image crafters say he’s Barack Obama, but white,” intones the ad’s disapproving female narrator.

A series of comparisons follow that make Obama look good -- and O’Rourke look like a preening, entitled fraud.

It slams O’Rourke’s “blue-blood pedigree” and insists his “billionaire father-in-law,” William Sanders, bought him a congressional seat “after Beto did [Sanders’] bidding on the El Paso city council.”

Is this true? Forbes magazine has stated that Sanders is not a billionaire, putting his net worth “more likely ... in the neighborhood of $500 million” -- still a tidy sum, to be sure. Whether O’Rourke helped out his father-in-law as an El Paso councilman remains an open question. In a nutshell, says Forbes, O’Rourke abstained from some relevant votes but “didn’t object when the mayor of El Paso threatened property owners with having their properties seized under eminent domain and sold to a real-estate investment trust started by Sanders.”

The Club for Growth ad goes on to insist that O’Rourke demeaned the opposite sex while in college, “casting aspersions on working women whose, quote, only qualifications seem to be large breasts and tight buttocks.” (O’Rourke, then 19, was referring to performers in a Broadway musical. When the student-newspaper theater review came to light during his unsuccessful U.S. Senate run last year, O’Rourke apologized for it, saying he was “ashamed of what I wrote.”)

The spot points out that Barack Obama was editor of the Harvard Law Review, “breaking barriers.” O’Rourke, the ad then states, “crashed into them [meaning actual, rather than metaphorical, barriers], causing a collision while driving drunk, then fleeing the scene to avoid accountability.” O’Rourke has also apologized for the 1998 drunk-driving arrest and has claimed he did not try to leave the scene of the accident.

Apart from bringing up some of O’Rourke’s youthful mistakes, the ad aggressively presses progressive hot buttons, calling the former congressman the poster boy for “white male privilege” and saying his drawn-out process of deciding on a presidential run represents the kind of “navel-gazing, self-involved behavior a woman or a person of color could never get away with. Especially after losing an election.”

“With a charmed life like his, you can never really lose,” the ad continues. “That’s why Beto’s running for president. Because he can.”

Watch the video below:

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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