With three weeks to go before voters in the Bay State vote to elect the successor to Ted Kennedy, the GOP candidate in the race, State Senator Scott Brown, is invoking another Kennedy in his first ad of the campaign. The 30-second spot begins with a black and white video of President John F. Kennedy giving a speech calling for tax cuts and merges into a video of Brown completing Kennedy's speech. The ad, entitled Different People, Same Message is running statewide on both cable and network television.

Watch it:

The ad references the Kennedy tax cuts but it doesn't note that the top marginal tax rate at the time was 91 percent and that Kennedy was proposing a top rate of 70 percent in an era of budget surpluses. It's a far cry from the situation we face today. If anything, irresponsible tax cuts that have only served to enrich the already fabulously wealthy while bleeding the US Treasury dry.

While Congressional Quarterly continues to rate the general election contest Safe Democratic, the GOP is devoting more resources in the hopes of stealing the seat. The Brown campaign is also circulating a fundraising letter written by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney who is now living in La Jolla, California. In the letter, Romney touts Brown's credentials as a fiscal conservative while also noting, in bold, that he would become the critical 41st Republican vote against the health care bill when it comes back to the Senate for final passage.

While Brown ran unopposed in the GOP primary, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley had to fend off challenges from three other candidates to win the Democratic nomination. Coakley did win the primary race handily, posting a nearly 20-point victory over her closest challenger, Congressman Michael Capuano. Here is her Act Blue fundraising link. This is not a seat we can afford to lose even if the possibility of such remains remotely distant.