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In and outs of the political campaigns, focusing on Michigan and Lansing, Tim Skubick will report regularly throughout the primary and then general election campaigns.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Timing Was Off

 
     Timing is everything in the political game and the first guy to announce his candidacy for governor was the victim of poor timing in the nth degree.
      Quick, raise your hand.  How many heard, read, or saw Pete Hoekstra announce his GOP bid for governor?
      O.K.  We see Mrs. Hoekstra's hand over there and his three kids paid attention but that's about it.
      Suffice it to say the West Michigan congressman did not plan it that way. When he woke up on Monday morning, he hoped to reap a ton of free media exposure. 
      Instead he found himself in competition with the Rick Wagoner story.  It was plastered everywhere:  GM CEO tossed under the Silverado by President Obama.
      That dominated the morning news cycle only to be replaced by the 11 a.m. announcement by the president that he was giving GM and Chrysler one more chance to survive.
      And of course all the talking heads on Michigan media outlets proceeded to take the rest of the day's news cycle to sift the president's announcement.
      As if that wasn't bad enough, MSU's B-ball team making into the Final Four ate up even more media attention
      Hoekstra, who needs to line up support in Southeast Michigan, was hoping for some headlines and a photo. But in the final insult of the day, he got neither as the two major newspapers on that very day, scrapped their home delivery service leaving Hoekstra hoping that somebody would "read all about it" on the Internet.
      His announcement was not completely ignored as the political media covered him, but when they add up the exposure he did receive vs. what he could have received, he can thank Wagoner, Obama, and Izzo for messing with his timing big time.
     
 

2 Comments:

Anonymous Janice Daniels said...

Points well taken; however if there were an objective medium in this town there might have been more than just a 15 second radio blurb this morning about the Hoekstra candidacy, which could actually prove to make this Republican primary quite interesting. I am curious to see all the big R candidates tripping over themselves to be the most conservative; the most constitutional; and/or the most willing to hand the power back to the People of all. At this point I have about as much faith in the big Rs as I have in obama's pre- election delicate scalple that he so eloquently promised to use to disect our nation's problems. Yes, I mean that same post-election scalple that he is now using to blast a hole the size of Montana into our economy and our Constitution.

March 31, 2009 at 8:25 PM 
Blogger Jim15032 said...

As if these things were surprises for Mr. Hoekstra (well, the Wagoner firing could have been).

Has the man forgotten that he is basically unknown outside his home district?

April 1, 2009 at 11:02 AM 

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