Sarah Steelman

As America waits for the text message from Barack Obama announcing his vice-presidential choice, GOP circles are buzzing about Kenny Hulshof's big announcement. 

According to straight faced GOP sources, Kenny Hulshof will use text messaging to announce a real jobs plan an earmark for a Bridge to Nowhere an endorsement of his candidacy by Sarah Steelman. 

I'm guessing Kenny is out of cell range.  Story Continued »

Nearly two weeks after the GOP gubernatorial primary, Sarah Steelman still can't name one Republican candidate for Governor she will support.

After watching Kenny limp across the primary finish line, I don't blame her. 

I should probably start by noting that Republicans rightfully shouldn't care who I think people ought to support in a GOP gubernatorial primary.

But it does strike me that Missouri Republicans (or at least those who aren't yet too embarrassed to pull a GOP ballot) have a very clear choice.

They can choose the candidate whom everyone expects to win and who probably will, yet who has generated close to zero excitement, even among his own partisans.  Or they can choose the candidate for whom a victory would embody a total meltdown failure of the Republican Party's establishment and infrastructure.  

My god, this thing is still going on?

Steelman probably had to loan her campaign $200K just so they could keep filling the tank. 

Two of the major components of Sarah Steelman's campaign for governor have been her repeated blasting of Rod Jetton for his questionable ethics as Speaker of the House and her persistent hectoring of Kenny Hulshof for his history of profligate spending.  Yet Steelman has demonstrated little willingness to stand up on these counts in the context of a position which she already holds, as an ex oficio member of the Board of Trustees of the Missouri State Employees' Retirement System (MOSERS).

Back in March of this year, Speaker Jetton demonstrated his lax ethical standards propensity for self-dealing by shoehorning himself into a House-appointed slot on the Board of the state employee retirement system, MOSERS.  Steelman, who is also a member of the MOSERS board by virtue of her elected position as State Treasurer, had nothing to say about Jetton's self-appointment at the time, despite her now-regular campaign harping over the Speaker's ethical struggles.

What's more, Steelman --though she's constantly ready to read from a list of wasteful government spending supported in Congress by her opponent Kenny Hulshof-- has shown no desire to speak out against wasteful spending over which she presumptively has some measure of control. 

A prime example: though Jetton didn't see fit to make it to an annual meeting of the MOSERS board to which he appointed himself just months earlier, he did manage to travel to London in the last week on the dime of MOSERS, which is of course funded with taxpayer dollars. 

So a certain blogger sees fit to attack a candidate for spending $75,000 on web-based advertising that has helped him build a ten point lead in a three-way primary. 

This seems an odd line of assault when that blogger himself engineered the expenditure of $300,000 for television ads in the Kansas City media market for his gubernatorial candidate only to see her get beat in that market by some guy named Scott Long in the most recent public polling. 

Really, you have to hand it to the Steelman for Governor campaign for making the smoke and mirrors last this long.

There was ample time for Republicans of all kinds --Congressional Republicans, statewide elected Republicans, legislative Republicans-- to stake out a position in opposition to Rod Jetton's clearly untoward political consulting business when the issue first arose a couple years ago.   Of course, none of them did. 

Not Sarah Steelman, not Peter Kinder, not Kenny Hulshof.  None of those moral midgets thought Rod Jetton's consulting arrangement, which was as inappropriate then as it was during this session, was something with which they should concern themselves. 

But now that Jetton is a lame duck, term-limited Speaker who has lowered the gavel on his last meaningful legislative session these prominent Republicans are falling over one another trying to find a podium or an open mic from which they can tsk at Jetton and feign outrage at a practice of his they've known about since early 2006. 

Via Youtube comes an amateurish (that's part of the charm) web video from a member of the never-say-die Ron Paul internet dead-enders crew.  The vid encourages viewers to contribute to a Sarah Steelman "Money Bomb" on June 27th.

A "money bomb" is apparently a tactic used to great effect by the Ron Paul for President campaign, which raised $6 million in one day with its own money bomb earlier during the primary season.