Laura Berman over at The Detroit News doesn’t like Pete Hoekstra’s dumber than racist “China owns America!” commercial:
My instincts say he’s as tone-deaf as the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which boldly cut out money to Planned Parenthood, and then reversed itself once angry women unleashed a 72-hour deluge of Facebook fury.
On Sunday night, Hoekstra’s campaign unveiled a “Debbie Spend-It-Now” attack ad, which deploys an astonishing array of cheesy Chinese stereotypes to make sport of Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
I’m certainly on board with Berman’s analysis of the commercial and how it doesn’t appeal to anyone other than the racists already planning to vote for Pete Hoekstra. But the article seems to accept the premise of the ad that China owns most of our government debt. But it doesn’t. The total foreign owned debt is 32%. For China, it is 8%. The majority of our government debt is owned by… Americans.
So Pete Hoekstra’s “Doesn’t California look like China?” commercial is not only offensive and ineffective, it is also just factually wrong.
