Hotline On Call

Updated at 4:52 p.m.

Hoping to find traction two weeks before the Senate GOP primary, Virginia tea party activist Jamie Radtke is airing a new radio ad that uses Democratic candidate Tim Kaine as an attack dog against Republican frontrunner George Allen.

The minute-long ad features footage from a debate in December, when Kaine asked Allen why he had voted to raise his salary while in the U.S. Senate.

Allen stumbled in his reply. "I don't think, uh, the reason I did is, in those days, the way that the salaries were done was, was calculated on what federal employees, uh, were receiving," he said.

Radtke's relative shoestring campaign has put little money behind the ad, placing just under $10,000 worth of spots, according to two people familiar with the ad buy.

The narrator in Radtke's ad calls Allen, who lost the same Senate seat in 2006, "an election disaster waiting to happen and Tim Kaine knows it." Allen famously stumbled six years ago when he called out a video tracker hired by his opponent "macaca," which can be viewed as an ethnic slur. Allen apologized but his campaign never recovered.

For now, the former senator appears on a glide path through the GOP primary, as Radtke's candidacy has not attracted the kind of infusion of national money and tea party attention that other Senate Republican races have.