Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg’s campaign team faced an interesting decision on Tuesday:  Should they contest the new campaign commercial by Democrat Congressional candidate Dennis McDonald and give him a day or two of free publicity, with links to the commercial in most newspapers, not to mention several news stories about it across the state, or should they just let it go because they are probably far ahead of him in the race.

Rehberg’s legal team decided to fight the McDonald advertisement firing off a 29-page document to the six Montana television stations telling them line by line how many errors were in the campaign commercial. You see the document HERE. It is written by lawyers, so it’s wordy.

Today on the state’s largest newspaper’s website (Billings Gazette) you can find the McDonald television commercial, the internet commercial, the script to the television commercial, the script to internet commercial, and a photo of McDonald. The same things are probably published across the state (as this state is a basically a two newspaper state) – and that’s publicity money can’t buy.

I actually saw the commercial. There are two; one for TV (30 seconds) and one for the internet (60 seconds). I don’t think it was a “major buy” in campaign terms because it’s not something I’m seeing at every local commercial break. Plus, it’s very late in the campaign season and McDonald’s ship is sinking, but maybe this is his “October surprise” or as some will say, a “last-ditch effort” to try a win a race that most people think Rehberg will win by at least 15 percent.

The part that caught my attention was the line in the internet commercial, “Driving fast on Flathead Lake in a speedboat…” which is a totally false statement as everyone, including McDonald, knows Rehberg was not driving the boat. It has been well-documented by legal authorities that State Senator Greg Barkus was the driver. The commercial also mentions the anonymous e-mail that said Rehberg fell off his horse reportedly drunk on a visit to Kazakhstan in 2004, and that Rehberg filed a lawsuit against the Billings Fire Department after putting out his fire. These last two points were also contested by the Rehberg legal team as containing false or misleading information.

It seems the Montana television stations have decided to continue to run the ads. We’ve seen these types of commercials run in almost every statewide race every two years and some really do contain false and misleading information, not to mention outright lies. That should not happen.

As for Rehberg contesting the commercial by McDonald, it was probably not the brightest thing for his young and inexperienced campaign team to do. McDonald has won this little battle. As for winning the war, that’s not going to happen.