As the midterm election draws ever closer, the Michigan Republican Party has partnered Congressional candidate Tom Barrett with Brooke Chapel, a political flame-thrower well-known in the Hartland community, in an eye-popping attack piece on U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin that hit some Livingston County mailboxes last week. (Chapel is listed on the piece as only “Brooke, Hartland, mother of four.”)
Pairing Barrett with Chapel on the mailing is an interesting move by the state GOP. Instead of using a more mainstream or well-rounded Republican, the state party instead chose Chapel, a laser-focused crusader obsessed with LGBTQ kids in school.
Maybe choosing an extremist like Chapel is the point, but the question remains whether the piece garners Barrett any more support.
The piece would have us believe child sterilization and sex-change surgery will soon be on the menu of our elementary school cafeterias, with lunch ladies replaced by surgeons who instead of dishing up walking tacos will instead serve up sex reassignment surgery (without parental consent, of course, or any insurance payments).
The crazy allegations would be laughable if the political stakes weren’t so high.
Barrett mailingSlotkin said in a statement that Barrett is “ending his campaign the same way it started: drumming up fear and hate, and using children as political pawns.”
She went on to say that Barrett is not focusing on the concerns people share with her on the campaign trail.
What are parents talking about with her? “Playing catch-up from COVID, ensuring school safety, and making mental health resources more readily available,” Slokin said. “(Barrett) has never voted to approve a single dollar for our schools — voting as an extreme outlier against every bipartisan K-12 bill that (went) before him in his eight years in the (Michigan) Legislature.”
This race for the newly drawn 7th District is the most-expensive Congressional contest in the U.S. While I would expect that at this late stage in the campaign, while most polls have him trailing Slotkin in a still-close race, Barrett would swing for a political grand slam; instead, I am surprised that he’s settled for letting the state Republican party pair him with a community extremist in a “whatever sticks to the wall” approach, focusing on what is in reality a huge non-issue.
Voters deserve better.
