Saturday, May 08, 2010

Yes we are already sick of Wink Hartman ads

A lot of people are already getting sick of seeing Wink Hartman campaign TV Ads. Just recently the PrairiePopulistsAndProgressives.net posted an article; “Anyone Else Sick of the Wink Hartman Campaign Ads?”

The answer for a lot of us is YES. The ads run every hour on most TV stations and they are designed to drive a deep divide between the conservative Republican majority and the liberal minority.

Wink tries hard to look like a serious business leader who is “just like you” and wants common sense solutions to the problems in Washington. “I’m not a career politicians,” he said in recent ad.
Some simple questions come to mind with this guy immediately. How many of us have an arena named after us. Hartman does. Were is all the money coming from for all of those ads. The TV is saturated with them and they are not cheap. If he is against spending money so much, why is he spending an exorbitant amount for these ads?
Then there is the message itself. There is nothing new about it. Anyone who is over 25 has heard this all before. It’s straight off the Republican Party’s platform. What’s most interesting is his insistence that all the government had to do was get off the backs of small businesses and the economy would be up and running by now.
While many of us would agree that small businesses are not treated well in these modern times, it is extremely simplistic to claim that the present Democratic government (“all those liberals who are ruining the country”) created the economic slump (remember it started during George W. Bush’s administration) and the simple solution is to free up small businesses and quit spending money. It’s all so simple. It’s also a bunch of crap. Liberals have run the country before and they have run it during times of prosperity. Remember the John F. Kennedy era? Hartman acts as if this is the first time a liberal has ever been in the White House. None of these conservatives will admit that our bloated military budget simply never gets discussed when it comes to tax, spend and borrowing by the government.
No serious political scientist is going to believe that one simple solution can end a very complicated economic recession. It’s just not that simple to the more educated voter.
Hartman is trying to fill the seat vacated by Todd Tiahrt. Given that religious fundamentalists have kept him in office all these years, even though he is one of Kansas’ most corrupted politician, shows that Hartman has a winning chance.
For those of us who see through his phoney populism, it is important for us to ask who is paying for all these ads and who is this man going to really represent besides his constituents. Will he just sell his votes to the highest bidder as Tiahrt did? This is the question we need to keep raising.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As I recall, he ran with the slogan of "I believe in the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death". I wrote Wink, his campaign director and the Hutch News with a simple question: "Wink, what is your stand on the death penalty?"

I never got a reply to this simple question.

If he supports the death penalty then his statement is a lie. If he does not support the death penalty, then Wink would have risked losing the vote of many pro-death penalty people (some of which would have been from Kansas!)

I'm happy Wink did not win the primary.