Political Smokeout

Cleaning out the closet: The last postcards I had stacked up from the dozens you fantastic readers sent in to me. There’s an SDDP attack on Phyllis Heineman, a mailer from Rep. Bob Deelstra, and an SDDP attack on Hal Wick.

And now I’m done blitzing your RSS feed with all these postcards all at once.

Examples of GOP “slate cards”: Parties send these out all over the place to try to get the party faithful to vote a straight ticket. The law allows these without counting them as in-kind contributions to the candidates featured if there are a certain number of candidates featured on the card.

Logo parody: Here’s an example of clever graphic design by the Democrats. On the left is a Hal Wick postcard (decrying negative attacks against him), featuring the punny logo he’s used since, I am told, the 1970s: a burning candle.

On the right is a Democratic postcard attacking Wick. It features a burned-out “Wick” candle, wax dribbled down the side, melted and disheveled.

(The Democrats also did this with Manny Steele, who’s featured a construction-y border on his cards. Compare here and here.)

Proof the Dems have sent out positive cards: Ben Nesselhuf insisted the South Dakota Democratic Party has sent out about twice as many positive postcards as negative. It seems like all you hear about is the negative ones, which may be because that’s what they’re really sending or may be because everyone ignores the boring positive stuff. Anyway, here’s proof they actually have sent out some positive stuff, for Bernie Hunhoff, Jim Larson and Tom Jones.

District 25 Republican cards: A pair of positive cards from Jon Hansen and Tim Rave.

Template goof? I’m not certain if this is a mistake or not. The left postcard is a hit on Manny Steele and Hal Wick for voting for HB1234, which the postcard says makes them supporters of “one-size-fits-all” education.

The right postcard is a positive piece defending Jim Peterson for his small-town-school focus. “I protected our rural schools from folks in Pierre who wanted to close them,” it quotes Peterson saying.

But the headline is the same from the Steele-Wick mailer, “One-Size-Fits-All.”

I suppose they could be saying that’s what Peterson is AGAINST. But it seems unlikely.

Supporting my “mistake” thesis is that there’s an asterisk in the quote, which you would think would refer to a bill number or other reference. But it doesn’t go to anything.

The Dems are slinging these postcards out the door so fast the quality control seems to have slipped a little bit — see also that Lederman postcard (not this one)  that cited the wrong bill.

Hickey, good or bad? Both sides of the postcard war about state Rep. Steve Hickey. A South Dakota Democratic Party postcard attacking Hickey for his vote-switch on HB1234, and two from Hickey defending himself, one traditionally with endorsements, the other innovatively with a comic book theme.