Monday, October 15, 2007

Hollow Points

Posted By on Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 3:03 PM

GOP mailer for Tucson Weekly blog (click for larger size)
It doesn't look good the GOP candidates in this year's City Council election, but the Pima County Republican Party is still giving it the ol’ college try. The GOP dipped into its bank account to mail a get-out-the-vote piece with an illustration of a ballot getting tossed into the trash. That’s not the imagery we would have used—it probably gave most voters a subliminal hint of what they ought to do with the mailer—but we’re not campaign strategists.

The mailer had a list of ways the “Democrat Controlled City Council” had “failed” the city. Numero uno: garbage-collection fees.

Given that the Republicans were the ones to create the trash fee, we got to wondering just what the GOP meant by failure. Pima County party chair Judi White explains that that Democrats Nina Trasoff and Karin Uhlich failed to follow through with their promises to repeal or reduce the fees--which is certainly true. But White also acknowledged that her candidates this year—Mayor Bob Walkup, Lori Oien in Ward 2 and Dan Spahr in Ward 4—all think repealing the fee would be a bad idea. So basically, the GOP is knocking Democrats for agreeing that the city should keep the trash fee.

The mailer also said Democrats had failed to fix the streets or attend to neighborhood safety. But after some stuttering humina-humina-humina, White conceded that the Democrats had started a program of paving neighborhoods streets, though she says it should have started a long time ago. Like when the GOP controlled the council? (OK, to be fair, it was the GOP-controlled council that enacted the trash fee that freed up money for street maintenance.)

Strike three: The City Council is hiring more police officers and putting more money into after-school programs to help with those neighborhood-safety program--which is pretty much what the GOP council did before the Democrats were elected and what the GOP candidates would do if, by some miracle, they won in November.

The final item on the GOP’s failure checklist is a just a blank line that you can fill in. Hey, write down whatever you want: The GOP already made up the first three.