Editorial: Pete's Democratic playbook

Oh, this is rich. The party that perfected xenophobic, Red China-baiting politics is appalled that Republican Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra is China-baiting.

From the 2006 DeVos Smear-a-thon to the 2010 Snyder the Outsourcer to Senator Stabenow’s daily attempts to build a brick wall around the Pacific Rim, Michigan Democrats led by party chair Mark Brewer have played the China race card in order to mobilize their working-class base. It is base politics at its worst. Between the Yellow Peril and One Percenter envy, Democrats have their simplistic, perennial appeal to the vices of wrath and envy.

Hoekstra’s error, in other words, is that he playing from the Democrat’s one-note songbook. It’s so . . .Brewer-esque.

Hoekstra’s “really, really dumb” (in the words of GOP strategist Mike Murphy) use of a stereotypical Chinese actress before a stereotypical Chinese rice paddy background violates the first rule of political ads: Don’t use actors as ethnic stereotypes (even if it’s satire). Like Democratic ads, the spot singles out China ” not Japan or the U.K. or other foreign nations with substantial US debt holdings ” because them Chinese make yer blood boil.

But does anyone believe that Debbie Stabenow would have been called to the mat if she had used the name ad prop? Indeed, Bernero’s vile play of the China card in 2010 barely raised an MSM eyebrow, even as companies he himself recruited (a story we broke at MIView) to Lansing outsourced jobs just as Snyder’s Gateway once did.

As that example indicated, the China card is nonsense. China is a key market for Michigan goods – most conspicuously, it’s GM’s fastest-growing market. Hoekstra claims the race card is obscuring the ad’s larger message – but that larger message is flawed as well. As Paul Kersey writes at the Mackinac Center, the creditor is not the problem – it’s the debtor. It’s Washington.

If Hoekstra wanted to point overseas to illustrate the path on which “Debbie Spenditnow” has put America, he missed an opportunity during the Super Bowl to compare the U.S. to Obama’s cherished Europe. Greece, Italy, and other nations are imploding before our eyes because of the reckless polices of health care entitlement, crony capitalism, and union greed that Spenditnow & Co. have adopted.

Democrats are feigning outrage at Hoekstra’s ad. But the outrage is that the ad is right out of the Brewer Adworks.