First the ad.
Wait for it:
BOOOM!
What a remarkable campaign ad.
You don't see something like this very often.
The ad was very well-planned, with the first names only and occupations of the Gosar siblings (e.g. rural physician, private investigator) displayed as they trash their brother's record on health care, jobs, and the environment, and then the big reveal that their last name is Gosar and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is their brother! The ice cold look of smug satisfaction on the Brills' faces at the end of the ad gives me worse shivers than the infamous Herman Cain slow smile back in 2011.
This ad is an explosive mix of drama, intrigue, unintentional comedy, and shock value, a very well done attack ad by the David Brill for Congress campaign, and it makes you wonder what kind of family dysfunction haunts the Gosars, that would make them publicly speak out against their own brother's reelection campaign to Congress.
Though they say it's not family dysfunction that has turned the siblings Gosar against one of their own, but partisan dysfunction.
David Gosar, one of the six out of Rep. Paul Gosar's nine siblings who have endorsed his Democratic opponent for Congress this November, says he stopped talking to Paul around 2010 when his brother was first elected to office, and told David that he believed in the "Birther" theory that Barack Obama was not born in the US.
The rest of the family says:
"For the first seven of the eight years Paul has been a Congressman, we kept silent out of deference to his immediate family and our parents, despite his many attacks against our interests and the interests of his constituents, like affordable healthcare coverage."
But the tipping point that led them to speak out against their brother this year came when Gosar said that George Soros funded last year's white nationalist "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and suggested that Soros (a Jewish Holocaust survivor) collaborated with the Nazis when he was 14 years old.
Gosar is also the congressman who made this bizarre utterance that you may remember from the widely watched Peter Strzok congressional testimony: "Mr. Strzok, I am a dentist and so I read body language very, very well." His siblings cited this as an example in asserting of Gosar that, "He says inexplicable things that mature, intelligent, and thoughtful 60-year-old adults would never say."
In response to the ad, Rep. Gosar has said:
You can’t pick your family. We all have crazy aunts and relatives etc and my family is no different. I hope they find peace in their hearts and let go all the hate.#AZ04#MAGA2018September 22, 2018
And:
My siblings who chose to film ads against me are all liberal Democrats who hate President Trump. These disgruntled Hillary suppporters are related by blood to me but like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud. #Az04 #MAGA2018September 22, 2018
The attack ads from his own family may not imperil his chances of reelection in a district the incumbent won with 71.5 percent of the vote in 2016, a vast, rural, red district in which the Sarah Palin-style, conspiratorial conservatism plays well with voters.