Congressional candidate Mike Erickson (R-Lake Oswego) released a new campaign ad Wednesday accusing his campaign rival, state Sen. Kurt Schrader (D-Canby), of supporting taxes even as American families were struggling with a poor economy.

In the ad, Erickson claims that while Schrader was serving in the Oregon legislature, he voted to raise taxes 70 times. The ad also warned that if elected to Congress, Schrader would vote for higher taxes that Erickson said would kill small businesses and jobs. But Schrader's campaign manager Paul Gage said that Erickson's attack ad was simply trying to distract voters from his own problems.

"We know and the voters know that Mike Erickson's relationship with the truth is casual at best," Gage said. "It serves to distract voters from his own issues of the past three months."

Those issues range from accusations that Erickson, a socially conservative candidate, paid for a fomer girlfriend's abortion, to having run-ins with officials at local county fairs, to accusations of misrepresenting a trip to Cuba as a humanitarian mission.

But through it all, Erickson has stayed on the campaign trail, including a joint appearance with Schrader at the Salem City Club last Friday. And although Erickson has no legislative experience, he is a successful business owner, and has said that he would be better suited to apply principles of fiscal responsibility to the legislative process on Capitol Hill.

"We have an economy that is headed for an economic train wreck and skyrocketing gas prices that are hurting families throughout the nation,” Erickson said in a statement. “Our government doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem. Oregon families don't need another tax-and-spend career politician in office.”

But, as Gage pointed out, the only thing that has stopped Erickson from having his own long-term political career is voters. Erickson has run unsuccessfully for a city council seat once, a state house seat twice, and is now on his second bid for the OR-5 congressional seat.

"The only reason he isn't a career politician is because he has not been elected," Gage said.