Anyone who has tried to drive around the Puget Sound area understands that traffic congestion has gotten worse in recent years. Perhaps that is why Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Bryant has launched his general election advertising with a TV ad about traffic.
In the ad, Bryant lays the blame for the current state of congestion at the feet of our “green” Governor, saying “Jay’s Inslee’s solution: more toll lanes and more congestion. Inslee’s left us sitting in these traffic jams!”
The charge seems accurate – Inslee does favor more toll lanes. And more congestion is guaranteed by increasing variable toll lanes, since they rely on general purpose lanes backing up to encourage/blackmail people to pay the toll to get out of traffic, and their primary benefit is to keep transit moving faster than cars.
Still, pretty tame stuff by most campaign standards, and the exact same message as a traffic ad that Jay Inslee ran when he campaigned for Congress in 1998, blaming the incumbent for traffic congestion.
However, that is not the way the folks at Inslee’s re-election campaign see the ad. To them, it’s a sign of the apocalypse.
Consider some of these quotes from the two fundraising emails (here and here that went out four hours apart from each other today (or about the time it takes some Fridays to go from Seattle to Olympia under Inslee’s transportation “leadership”):
- “the opening salvo in what will be a barrage of false, negative attacks”
- “flooding the airwaves with untrue ads”
- “we cannot afford to be outspent as ballots are getting ready to drop”
- “this flurry of false attacks”
- “they’re going all out negative against Jay”
However, it seems that the campaign flunkies didn’t even bother watching the ad about traffic, because they defended Jay by saying that “while Governor Inslee offers real solutions for our schools, our economy, and our environment, Bill Bryant hides behind deceptive, false attacks.”
Gee, they don’t mention that Inslee has offered any “real solutions” for transportation. Could it be he doesn’t have any, as Bryant’s ad suggests?
Additionally, the campaign laughably proposes fighting back by asking “Will you step up now with a donation of $5 to Jay’s campaign? We need 1,000 grassroots supporters to chip in right away.”
Yeah, right, that would raise $5,000 for Jay’s campaign, not even enough for one prime time TV ad. And this from a campaign which has already received more than $1.6 million from the State Democrat Party alone, and has spent more than $4 million dollars already on his re-election.
Perhaps the Inslee campaign could spare us the crocodile tears – and maybe ask Jay to come up with a transportation plan that actually reduces congestion, as opposed to clogging the internet with fake campaign pleas.
Leave a Reply