Hoekstra ad costs him support from within his own party

by: Eric B.

Tue Feb 07, 2012 at 10:11:24 AM EST

The man who blamed Right to Life for his gubernatorial primary loss.

Washtenaw County, Michigan Commissioner Alicia Ping (R) says she was leaning toward endorsing former Rep. Pete Hoekstra in the Republican primary for Senate. But that’s all over now. On Monday, Ping donated money to Clark Durant, Hoekstra’s longshot rival in the primary. She told me she’d publicly endorse him if Durant asks her to.

Why the change of heart? Hoekstra’s controversial Super Bowl ad, which the Chinese-American Ping called “demeaning”, is a part of it. But it was more Hokestra’s refusal to acknowledge that he’d made a mistake running the ad that really lost him Ping’s support.

 

 

“If he didn’t know it was racist on some level, then shame on him,” Ping told me in a phone interview Monday night. “He didn’t apologize or say ‘maybe it was over the top’ or anything. He said, ‘I stand by what I believe in’ and, ‘the liberals are just making a bigger thing out of it.’ Well that’s not the case at all. It’s offensive and it’s racist. It’s demeaning to the Asian-American population.”

Hoekstra's latest blunder has, as of this morning, netted him nationwide press. It's a remarkable feat considering he isn't actually the Republican candidate, yet. Naturally, Hoekstra has his own thoughts about the ad, which in an act of cluelessness not seen since the Freep ran a story puzzled at how an unmoderated, open comment thread about politics turned into a flame war are that it is great because it focuses attention on Debbie Stabenow's voting record.

Here's a little nugget, and a sign of things. The people who produced the ad are the same people who produced Christine O'Donnell's "I'm not a witch" ad. At some point, when this campaign was vetting companies to create this ad, they had to have seen that and Carly Fiorina's "Demon Sheep" ad, and said, "Those are fantastic ... go with it!"

Update! ... By the way, most of you have no doubt seen this already, but this was the reaction to Republican operative Mike Murphy:

Mike Murphy, the well-known national Republican political consultant, said of the ad in a Twitter post: "Pete Hoekstra Superbowl TV ad in MI Senate race really, really dumb. I mean really."

Or, as someone said down in comments ... Hoekstra is working very hard to make the War of the Roses as competitive as possible (well, I added the War of the Roses metaphor, but whatevs).

Update 2! ... More? Why not. This is currently the political story everyone's talking about, so we may as well be boring. Over at the New Yorker, they point out that Hoekstra's ad isn't just racially charged but downright factually inaccurate.

For all the xenophobia and mistakes, the thing that might really worry a voter is that a man can get this far in the U.S. political system without a basic grip on the mechanics of his government. “You borrow more and more,” the N.P.S.A. says. But that is false, says the U.S. Treasury. Chinese holdings of U.S. treasury bonds, in fact, declined from November of 2010 to November 2011. “China has not been a major buyer of U.S. treasury notes on the margin for a couple of years now,” Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese economics and politics at Northwestern University, told me.

Hoekstra's history of gaffes and blunders are pretty well documented, from Tweeting about secret visits to Iraq while on House intelligence committee to the above-mentioned bit where he blamed his gubernatorial primary loss to benevolent overlord Rick Michigan on Right to Life's endorsement of Mike Cox, something that prompted a fake Tea Party Right to Life to spring to life (don't these people always manage to find new and interesting ways to split people into divisions?). Why at this late stage should anyone expect that Hoekstra's second shot at the big stage be any different? That means you, Stephen Henderson. A political campaign reflects the leadership at the top, and if the campaign is making poor choices in advertising, perhaps that's as much an indictment of the leadership at the top as it is of the people who made the ad. Meanwhile, Hoekstra continues to defend the ad as one focusing on the voting record of Debbie Stabenow, except that it has done that in the same way that the Komen Foundation's decision to stop funding breast cancer screenings through Planned Parenthood struck a decisive blow in the rightwing's war on abortion providers.