Unqualified Endorsements

Those operatives putting in 18 hour days are reminded to set all their pre-4G wireless devices ahead one hour. (Unless they are supposed to be set back one hour in the Spring?) Your LakeCountyEye recalls there is an easy-to-remember Daylight Savings Time mnemonic ...

Before the Primary Election set your clocks ahead;
Before the General Election, set them back instead!

Haha, the 2012 Primary is just around the corner and after weeks of foot-dragging, desperate candidates are tripping over themselves with eleventh-hour gambits to get the leg-up on their opponents. Back in 2008, Barack Obama ran his first successful presidential campaign. And every Lake County candidate who had a photograph with (then Senator) Obama was going to win on the basis of that photo plus a last-minute mailer. Your LakeCountyEye recalls more than one candidate, with Obama envy, who produced an appropriate image with the help of Photoshop. And those were the Republican candidates ... rimshot!

Well things were done old-school, back in the day. As readers of this blog are dubiously aware ...

A Third Party Endorsement

Nowadays Lake County candidates cut out the middleman and just send out mailers with a cut-and-paste photo of Obama next to theirs. And, wawa haha, their opponents are crying foul. If your opponent has got that implied-Obama endorsement all sewed up, don't get mad, get even. Your LakeCountyEye advises any operative in this situation to double down and raise the stakes. It's no secret that the varnish is off the Obama brand -- there are better endorsements to be had than Obama's. Ten, and counting ...

Ten Fake Endorsements to be Preferred Over a Fake Obama Endorsement

Michelle Obama Rachael Ray Donald Trump Mike Ditka Oprah Taylor Swift Samuel Adams The Progressive Insurance Girl Justin Bieber God

Look for your LakeCountyEye, endorsing your candidate, TBD.

A Third Party Endorsement

It ordinarily takes a lot to interrupt your LakeCountyEye's dogmatic slumbers -- especially with daylight savings time kicking in at 2AM tonight. So naturally your LakeCountyEye ignored some irrelevant political noise recently produced by the Rockefeller Republicans over at TeamAmerica10th:

If you are a Democrat, an Obama endorsement is often seen as the Golden Ticket to a win, and people go to sometimes desperate lengths to get it... or at least appear like they have gotten it. IL-10 hopeful Brad Schneider may well have crossed the line, however, in sending out a mailer that prominently displays the picture of the President in the company of other endorsers, such as former Congresswoman Melissa Bean, the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Herald. Schneider got called out on this by front-running opponent Ilya Sheyman (who recently won a huge victory (73%) in the 10th Dems straw poll this past weekend), and the story has attracted the attention of Huffington Post and Politico.
IL-10: Brad Schneider Taking Heat for Too-Close-For-Comfort Suggestion of Obama Endorsement

It goes without saying that if HuffPo has covered something in Lake County, can the Daily Herald be far behind?

The piece doesn't sit well with fellow Democratic candidates John Tree, Ilya Sheyman and Vivek Bavda. Tree called Schneider's use of Obama's image on the flier "deplorable." "This blatant attempt by Brad to inflate his own campaign with misleading and patently false associations should be called out for the shameful act that it was," Tree said in an email.
10th District Democrat criticized for using Obama image on flier

Now, your LakeCountyEye may be just a simple country blogger, but even your LakeCountyEye knows that these political mailers that choke-spam the US mailboxes during elections do little more than annoy voters and get directly consigned to their dustbins.

So, if your LakeCountyEye was advising Brad Schneider, Schneider's ops are advised to send some nice thankyou notes to TeamAmerica10th and Huffington Post and Politico and the Daily Herald for all the free earned media. And send some nice contribution checks to Ilya Sheyman and John Tree and Vivek Bavda for their help in reaping all of that earned media from some crappy campaign mailer they doubtless spent too much money on.

It also never hurts to send a nice contribution check to your LakeCountyEye.