The “most incompetent man in Maryland” is back.
Maryland Republican gubernatorial nominee Larry Hogan used that moniker to mock his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, in a Web ad just hours after they won their respective primaries in June.
A second installment surfaced on YouTube late Monday, taking Brown to task for the loss of small businesses in the state, money wasted on the online health insurance exchange, tax increases and taking “eight years to come up with a plan” to fix the economy.
The Brown campaign panned the sequel, calling it an attempt by Hogan to distract voters from his “right-wing Republican agenda.”
The ad — a spoof on the Dos Equis beer commercials featuring “the most interesting man in the world” — also knocks Brown for having a campaign van with a Virginia license plate.
“And it seems that even his campaign van wants to move — to Virginia,” the narrator says.
The first installment drew rave reviews from Hogan supporters, receiving about 20,000 views online, according to Hogan spokesman Adam Dubitsky.
But Hogan also took considerable flak for using a Facebook photo in the ad that showed Brown and his running mate “Zaching” — a muscle-man post meant as a tribute to Zach Lederer, a University of Maryland student and men’s basketball team manager who died in March after a battle with brain cancer. After one of his surgeries, Lederer posed for a photo, flexing his muscles in his hospital gown, that later went viral.
Despite that controversy, Dubitsky said the Hogan campaign decided to employ humor again to highlight some of the shortcomings of Brown’s past eight years in office.
Brown campaign officials were hardly amused.
“Larry Hogan is desperately trying to distort the truth and hide his conservative agenda to give huge tax breaks to big corporations, all while opposing raising the minimum wage and rejecting universal Pre-K — issues that matter to every Maryland family,” said Brown campaign manager Justin Schall. “Come Election Day, voters will reject Larry Hogan’s right-wing Republican agenda.”