After crowing about how effective his
racist Super Bowl ad had been for weeks, the
reality of the matter is finally settling in for Republican Rep. and Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra.
Yeah, it turns out that Michigan voters aren't so keen on overt racism. The ad was so toxic, in fact, that the Hoekstra camp is doing everything possible to
scrub the ad off the internet.
Hoekstra, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has scrubbed all mention of the ad featuring an actress portraying a Chinese woman speaking in broken English from his campaign Facebook page and YouTube account. Back on Feb 5, when the ad ran during the Michigan broadcast of the Super Bowl, Hoekstra posted it in both places. Then as the controversy kicked up, he used his YouTube account to post clips of him vehemently defending the spot on Fox News.
Now the ad is gone from his Facebook page (as captured in this screenshot, which shows all entries from Feb. removed) as well as his YouTube account. More interestingly, Hoekstra's defense of the ad has also been scrubbed from YouTube (as this screenshot shows).
That was a weird ad, truly. Originally, I thought the ad was geared toward helping Hoekstra in his primary race. Obviously, nothing plays better in Republican circles than overt racism and xenophobia. But given that Hoekstra is dominating the
primary field, that really makes no sense. He's going to get the nomination easily, and will likely keep his opponents in the single digits. So that wasn't it.
The only explanation that makes sense is that Hoekstra's team thought it would win them points in the general election against Sen. Debbie Stabenow. They genuinely believed that the voters of their state were racist xenophobes who would applaud the offensive ad.
In a cycle full of dramatic GOP overreach and unforced errors, it won't be the last time that Republicans misread the public.