Empire State of Mind

As many of you have undoubtedly read, Mr. Tiahrt’s campaign recently released a campaign ad that criticized his opponent for raising taxes. Putting aside the dubious and unjustified claims about the differences between Tiahrt and Moran’s respective votes related to raising and lowering taxes, the most interesting thing about this commercial is the fact that it featured several shots of tax forms from the state of New York.

Sure this is just a minor detail from yet another attack ad, but the problem I have with this is that it shows how aloof Mr. Tiahrt is from the people of Kansas. While I doubt that Mr. Tiahrt personally oversaw every shot of this commercial, I also doubt that any reasonable Kansan would inexplicably use the New York tax forms when creating the advertisement. The appearance of these forms in the commercial is symbolic of Mr. Tiahrt’s inside-the-beltway preferences, and the likelihood that the ad was created by some east coast political operative.

Mr. Tiahrt might make claims about how great of a state Kansas is, and he might make claims about all of the work that he does to bring jobs to the state; but when push comes to shove it seems completely evident that his campaign must be paying people outside of Kansas to run his campaign and to make his commercials. Why wouldn’t Mr. Tiahrt use his campaign funds to keep jobs and money within the state?

Todd Tiahrt is a long-time politician that doesn’t live in Kansas and only really seems to care about Kansans because they have propped up his east coast lifestyle for far too long. I believe it is time to allow Mr. Tiahrt to leave behind Kansas for good and do whatever he is going to do after his political career is over [Publius Prediction: Mr. Tiahrt gets a job with some really shady lobbying firm.]

Yours on the range,

Publius