Angle speaks to Colo. group

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. - Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada said Friday her race against Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has tightened up recently because of attack advertisements aimed at her immediately after the primary. But, she noted, her own campaign war chest is growing, and she's ready to unleash ads of her own.

Angle told a conservative group in Steamboat Springs about her latest ad that says Reid's "tragic love story" with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blame for the country's financial struggles.

"Harry Reid has become the poster child of what's gone wrong in America in the last 18 months. And Nevada, his state, has become the example of what is going to happen to the rest of our country if we don't get going in a different direction," Angle said, referring to figures that show Nevada leads the country in unemployment and foreclosures.

Angle, a tea party favorite, said she's ready to unleash attacks against her opponent.

"What has happened is that he had the money to begin that personal attack right after the primary and that's exactly what's he's done," Angle told about 100 people at the Steamboat Institute's annual Freedom Conference. "I have been building a war chest to come back at him with those commercials."

On the same day as Angle's commercial, Reid unveiled an attack ad of his own, saying the Republican is as an extreme candidate who says rape victims should be forced to have their babies and who wants to use a Scientology program in prisons.

Democrats have had plenty of fodder to blast Angle as an extremist, seizing on her comments that Social Security should be phased out and that the Department of Education should be nixed.

On Friday, Angle defended her positions. Pointing to a large screen behind her showing her sitting on the back of a pickup truck, she said, "That's truly who I am. I'm just a Nevada country girl."

Angle stood away from the podium onstage, delivering her remarks without a microphone and without notes, saying she didn't want to have a "barrier with the audience."

"I'm going to speak to you from my heart," she said.

On Social Security, she didn't say it should be eliminated but said people should have the option to have their own personalized retirement plans. She said the Department of Education "is one of those areas that states would be better off handling."

"The Department of Education is a policy department that takes a one-size fits-all policy that fits no one," Angle said. "We all found that out with 'No Child Left Behind."'

She also praised Arizona's new law cracking down on illegal immigrants as an example of a state exercising its sovereign rights under the 10th Amendment, and said, if elected, one of her top priorities would be to repeal the new federal health reform law.