In one of the hardest-hitting commercials of the campaign season, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley is calling Democrat Dannel Malloy a liar for distorting his own jobs record and Foley's business record.
In particularly blunt terms, Foley says that Malloy needs to tell the truth.
The commercial starts by saying, "Dan Malloy's new negative ad? 3 lies in 30 seconds.''
The ad then says that Malloy distorted Foley's record at The Bibb company in Georgia, which Foley once owned before the company filed for bankruptcy. The Bibb controversy became a major issue in the Republican primary, and now Malloy has raised the issue again in the general election.
Foley's commercial then switches to Malloy's own record on jobs. "Dan Malloy says he created jobs, but official records say Stamford lost 13,000 jobs since 2000,'' the ad states. "Dan Malloy: misrepresenting Tom Foley's record and caught in a lie about his own. Connecticut needs a governor who tells the truth.''
Even though the commercial has been playing regularly since Friday night, Malloy said in an interview Monday that he had not yet seen it.
"Mr. Foley has the right to spend his money saying what he wants to say,'' Malloy said. "We have a very clear message about the future of Connecticut, and I think our message is being embraced. He'll do whatever he wants to do, I suppose.''
He declined to comment at all about his own commercial's statements about the Bibb Company and Foley's response.
"I'm not going to get into commenting on his advertising end of it,'' Malloy said, referring questions to his chief strategist, Roy Occhiogrosso. "You know who to call. They're better at that than I am.''
Occhiogrosso maintains that the charges that are mentioned in the commercial are true.
"The facts speak for themselves,'' Occhiogrosso said. "If Tom thinks there's a different set of facts, then he should release all his business and tax records to prove whatever point he's trying to make."
The comments came on a day when Malloy received the endorsement of the nearly 1,100-member state police union and the cross-endorsement of the Working Families Party, which was the first cross-endorsement in the governor's race since 1938.