Pete "Spendalot" Hoekstra

Seriously? Hoekstra is trying to sell himself as Pete Spenditnot with his tone deaf Super Bowl ad? To begin with, Hoekstra spent a lot to air it. The total cost is $150,000 for the Super Bowl slots and an additional two week run.

As for the ad’s premise that Debbie Stabenow is the big spender and he is some paragon of fiscal virtue, Dale has Hoekstra’s voting record covered. When he was in Congress, Pete Spendalot voted to put every unpaid for, deficit raising GOP policy on the national credit card from Medicare D, to the ill conceived occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Bush tax cuts for their ultra rich cronies. And then he cruised straight from Congress through the revolving doors to cash in his connections for a cushy job at Dickstein Shapiro, a K Street lobbyist shop in DC. A job he still holds, advocating for big money interests, even as he’s running for Stabenow’s seat.

And, as for the disgraceful racial undertone in the ad, Hoekstra is claiming it’s inadvertent and meant to be satire. By definition, satire is supposed to be clever and humorous. The ad is neither. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would recognize that the ad’s stereotyping is insulting to Asians. And thus Pete Spendalot squanders his political capital. Today Washtenaw County, Michigan Commissioner Alicia Ping, a Republican, threw her support to Hoekstra’s primary opponent Clark Durant.

Hoekstra’s strategy with this horrible ad is painfully transparent. Clearly, he hoped to generate big media attention by callously exploiting the smallest minority population in Michigan and then using the predictable outrage to woo conservative voters with the claim the criticism is just another instance of liberal over-reaction. But his bigotry is about to backfire. Commissioner Ping advises “leaders from across the minority populations of Michigan will jointly condemn Hoekstra in an open letter tomorrow.”

Hoekstra may be leading the polls today, but his arrogant refusal to acknowledge his mistake and apologize could change those numbers dramatically. Furthermore, the attention this ad brought to his actual voting record, that contradicts his false claims of fiscal prudence, could and should end his candidacy. Michigan needs and deserves better than such a shameless opportunist as Hoekstra.