08.18.09

La mar-kee or Ma lar-kee? Hutchison announces

Posted in 2010 Primary, Around The State, Commentary, Road Issues, Transportation at 2:43 pm by wcnews

Yes the most unsurprising, and uninspiring, official announcement in Texas was made yesterday when GOP U.S Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison entered the race for Texas Governor. It’s also becoming painfully obvious that her campaign isn’t quite up to speed.

The first time he said it, you weren’t sure you had heard what you thought you heard. The second time, there was no doubt.

The disembodied announcer voice at Kay Bailey Hutchison’s gubernatorial campaign kickoff event was mispronouncing the name of her high school.

La Marque (la mark) High School had been fancified to La Marquis (la mar-kee) High School.

“They keep saying it,” a La Marque cheerleader said to a fellow cheerleader in the school gym where Hutchison announced her candidacy.

As BOR shows the snafus just keep coming, TX-Gov: Has Hutchison Gone From “Rocky Start” to Breaking the Law?

Isn’t that a violation of the Texas Election Code? Although the words “for” and “Governor” never appear on the screen, which may avoid the discussion of “type size” in the code, the announcer clearly says, “Kay Bailey Hutchison. Governor. For Texas,” a phrasing that obviously violates the intent of the law by giving the impression she is Governor instead of saying “for Governor,” so as to clarify that Hutchison does not hold the office of Governor.

My understanding is that, in the past, there have been sworn complaints against candidates up and down the ballot for not including these words in their campaign advertising and that fines have been levied against those candidates. I’m trying to do some research to find some examples, but it is definitely something I always expect to see in campaign materials.

Now, Senator Hutchison’s campaign may get by on a technicality; perhaps they know some loophole I don’t. But the intent of the law appears to be pretty clear: to keep non-incumbents from portraying themselves as incumbents, which she is clearly doing through the voice-over announcer.

At the very least, this is another example of Senator Hutchison’s perpetual “rocky start” to this campaign. But it could be a lot more serious this time — her campaign may have begun down a slippery slope where bad habits go from unprofessional to illegal.

The Governor’s mansion is not a retirement home, and even though Senator Hutchison is one of the few career politicians to hold her current statewide office longer than Rick Perry, that doesn’t mean she gets to pretend she’s already Governor and ignore campaign laws. We’ll be following up on this story as we learn more.

The DMN’s transportation blog points out that she’s given no details on transportation funding. While she said, “It is time to return to our tradition of free, quality highways and roads.” That means little. There are no free roads in reality. But free roads often means non-tolled roads. With only two way to pay for roads - tolls or taxes - we are left to assume she will finance roads, if elected, with taxes. But it’s unlikely that Hutchison will ever utter the “T” word in a GOP primary.

This DMN editorial has 6 questions Hutchison must answer.

You can listen to her interview yesterday on local KLBJ-AM radio with Jeff Ward. He asked her why not a two term limit in the US Senate? He didn’t bring up her own hypocrisy on term limits. That she went back on her pledge in1993 to only server two terms in the Senate.

Hutchison and her campaign are continuing to show the signs that they were expecting a coranation and not a campaign. Much of what we’ve seen so far just seems like a bunch of malarkey.

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