Press "Enter" to skip to content

Stenger drops first negative ad

Saint Louis, Mo. — Steve Stenger released his first negative ad of the general election cycle today that hopes to paint his Republican opponent, Rick Stream, as “too extreme” for county voters.

Stenger, a county councilman, is looking to succeed Charlie Dooley as the next St. Louis County Executive after a decisive victory over Dooley in the Democratic primary. Stream, a former state representative from Kirkwood and former House Budget Chairman, beat a Tea Party challenger for the Republican nomination.

The ad cycles through a list of Stream’s votes as a House member. Stream approved of last year’s bill nullifying federal gun control laws and voted to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a mandatory 72-hour waiting period for abortions with no exemption for rape or incest victims. The ad also hammers Stream on his support for 2013’s defunct tax cut bill, which the doom-and-gloom voice over calls “passing a billion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy,” while “raising taxes on seniors.”

“Rick Stream, too XStream for County Executive,” read the ad’s final words. Stenger enlisted a few surrogates to reinforce his message, as his campaign quickly distributed quotes supporting the ad from former state representative’s Barbara Fraser and Betty Thompson and Missouri U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill.

Rick Stream
Rick Stream

“There are so many extreme positions taken by Rick Stream, 30 seconds don’t do them justice,” McCaskill says in a statement. “He is massively out of step with the vast majority of St. Louis County. He’s downright scary.”

The characterization of Stream as a radical, die hard Republican may come as a bit of a shock to voters who have met the lawmaker. The soft-spoken Stream has a reputation in Missouri’s capital as a pragmatist with few axes to grind. But that won’t stop Stenger from painting Stream with a radical brush for his frequent support of Missouri Republican flagship issues.

The ad also comes on the heels of a poll from Missouri Scout, an independent political news services. The poll shows Stenger leading Stream 41-39, a statistical tie, with 16 percent of the vote up for grabs.

Stream countered the ad with a vicious statement.

“The extreme candidate in this race is Steve Stenger who has gotten rich defending countless dangerous criminals including major drug dealers, sexual predators, child pornographers and prostitution kingpins who used underage girls,” the Stream campaign responded in a statement. “Stenger’s views are so far outside the mainstream that he justified and defended the crimes of dangerous sexual predators because he believed the exploited girls, who were under 18, were engaging in a ‘lifestyle they chose.’ Stenger is mischaracterizing Rick’s record to divert voters from the real issues: creating jobs, improving our schools and ending corruption. Perhaps because after six years, of voting with Charlie Dooley 98 percent of the time and supporting every Dooley budget, Stenger has no plan for creating jobs or ending the corruption that is tearing St. Louis County apart.”