I had been thinking about the Gordon Smith ad, which shows Jeff Merkley eating a hot dog — a little too sloppily for most people’s liking — and being ambushed with a question about Georgia.\u00c2\u00a0 The advertisement seems to have back-fired a tad bit, which may be over-stating its simple ineffectiveness.\u00c2\u00a0 It is in some corners a bit of a laughing stock, and provides a basic problem for Smith, which is\u00c2\u00a0the electorate does not\u00c2\u00a0much cares about Russia’s incursion into Georgia, or at least doesn’t consider it the biggest issue\u00c2\u00a0in the election, hence\u00c2\u00a0it is fine that a Senate candidate is a couple of days\u00c2\u00a0behind the news cycle\u00c2\u00a0— The Weekly Standard\u00c2\u00a0and the neo-conservative sentiment that “We are all Georgians now” will just have to accept that.<\/p>\n
But that leaves us with the hot dog eating.\u00c2\u00a0 A tad sloppy.\u00c2\u00a0 Push aside that it tends to enforce the “blue collar average Joe” meme — Hey!\u00c2\u00a0 We all eat hot dogs and spill mustard on our shirts! — it does remind me of a controversy from the world of Australian politics.\u00c2\u00a0 Jeff Merkley may eat hot dogs with some spill-over, but it could be worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n Australia’s opposition leader lamented his past behavior on Wednesday, as images of him picking his ear wax in Parliament reached a growing audience via the Internet.<\/em><\/p>\n \n The embarrassing footage was captured by Parliament’s official television camera at least six years ago as Kevin Rudd, then a junior Labor Party lawmaker, sat in the House Representatives listening to a colleague question a government minister.<\/em><\/p>\n Rudd, who is likely to become Australia’s prime minister next month, is seen in the background absent-mindedly probing his left ear before apparently placing the same finger in his mouth.<\/em><\/p>\n The footage has found it way on to YouTube and has attracted increasing attention in recent weeks as Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, leads Prime Minister John Howard in opinion polls ahead of Nov. 24 elections.<\/em><\/p>\n I suspect that any challenger running for office who gets caught eating his own ear-wax would not make it, but I could be wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 Kevin Rudd made it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had been thinking about the Gordon Smith ad, which shows Jeff Merkley eating a hot dog — a little too sloppily for most people’s liking — and being ambushed with a question about Georgia.\u00c2\u00a0 The advertisement seems to have back-fired a tad bit, which may be over-stating its simple ineffectiveness.\u00c2\u00a0 It is in some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}