Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) has a new TV ad in his Senate campaign — responding to the controversy surrounding the controversial ad that started running in Michigan during the Super Bowl.
That ad, of course, featured an Asian-American actress speaking in broken English, as she rode her bicycle by the side of a rice paddy, to ‘thank’ incumbent Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow for spending and borrowing money from China.
“Your economy get very weak,” the woman said in the ad. “Ours get very good. We take your jobs.”
In Hoekstra’s new ad, he castigates the media — for distracting the public from the real issues in the race. This does point to a possibility we have noticed about the ad, that an aim of the ad may have been to seek out national outrage, and generate publicity for his campaign among conservative true believers.
The ad begins with a still shot of a sepia-toned sunrise (or sunset) of Capitol Hill — vaguely similar to the atmosphere in the China ad, but without repeating the same exact imagery — and a voiceover by Hoekstra.
“In spite of what the media says, this race is really our chance to tell Washington ‘spend it not,’” Hoekstra says. “Not on Obamacare, not on a failed stimulus, not on another Solyndra. Citizens Against Government Waste rates Senator Stabenow ‘hostile’ — and me, Pete Hoekstra, a ‘superhero.’ It’s wasteful government spending, versus American jobs.”
The video then cuts to Hoekstra himself: “There’s no more time for Debbie ‘Spend-It-Now.’ I’m Pete ‘Spend-It-Not’ Hoesktra, and I approve this message.”
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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