Behold the mighty gun lobby, as the Illinois State Rifle Association (local affiliate of the NRA) rallies to the defense of Debbie Halvorson in the Illinois 2nd Congressional District special election!
Um. That looks effective. What they'd do, get Jimmy the Intern to whip something up with a vintage 1980s-era 386 PC and
Print Shop? And the rest of the mailer isn't much better, as I'll show below the fold.
More photos of the mailer:
First they spell "Halvorson" correctly, so good for them! But then they go and blow it by misspelling it "Halverson" in the end. Close, but no cigar.
But even the hilarity of that is dwarfed by the copy writing! You can't turn someone like Bloomberg into a boogeyman with a single mailer and get people to give a shit about his involvement, and you sure as hell can't do it with copy this pathetic. The mayor of New York really "fears" Halvorson, but "the rest of America" is rooting for her? Citation, please? And if we don't want Bloomberg meddling in the race, why would we want the rest of America involved?
And speaking of the rest of America, they want the sensible kinds of gun regulations that Bloomberg supports, and the NRA/ISRA opposes. So really, if the rest of America knew who Halvorson even was, they'd be more than happy to take Bloomberg's side.
And that's aside from the outright lies—no, Bloomberg didn't support Toi Hutchinson, his Super PAC blasted her in one of its commercials.
"February" is hard to spell.
These guys planned to endorse Halvorson yesterday, then suddenly went dark with no explanation. Now they release a mailer with no mention of guns. It's clear that what was once a winning issue for Halvorson (and Hutchinson) has become as popular as raw sewage.
That's exactly what we hoped to see in this district, and thanks to Robin Kelly's fantastic campaign, it's what has in fact happened. Now we make sure we close the deal next Tuesday, so chip in a final few bucks so that Kelly can get her vote to the polls!
One last thought—responding to this idiotic mailer feels like responding to some random nut in a wingnut blog's comments section. But it's the freakin' gun lobby we're talking about, the local affiliate of the mighty all-powerful NRA. We've elevated the gun lobby so high in our minds that's it's still hard to process just how incompetent they've proven themselves these last few months, from everything Wayne LaPierre has said since Sandy Hook, to this local affiliate's efforts in this race.
Now we're finding out that they aren't all that. And they are beatable.
P.S. Nice union bug, though. I bet their donors love seeing their donations go to union members!