Sullivan should stop using his government account for campaign ads
Here is Sen. Dan Sullivan using his government Facebook account for a campaign ad made at the Gan Yeladim Early Learning Center in Anchorage, where there is a new playground under construction for special needs children.
It has nothing to do with the One Big Beautiful Bill, though Sullivan tries to convey the impression in his campaign ad that there is a direct link.
He no longer calls it the big beautiful bill, but the big working families tax cut, a name invented after the fact by Republicans because many voters think it was a big ugly political act.
Sullivan should be posting these campaign ads on his campaign website, not on his government social media accounts.
He has 54,000 followers on his government Facebook account, but only 20,000 on his campaign account, which may explain this practice.
With the entrance of Mary Peltola into the campaign, Sullivan has plastered his government sites with a steady stream of campaign items that show him walking out of the doors of hearing rooms and looking up to find a camera that just happens to be there for him to talk to.
He began the year by pretending to be out skiing, appearing from behind some bushes in Girdwood, saying “You know I like coming through doors. Well, hey, this is the ultimate door. God’s doors out here in Alaska’s beautiful wilderness.”
He went on to attack Democrats in what was clearly a campaign ad, and just so happened to have one of his Alaska Lockup posters in a shirt pocket under his ski jacket. He claims there were 70 executive orders. In fact, there was one executive order and an exaggerated number of executive actions.
“The Biden Lockup is what they want, 70 executive orders, the Last Frontier lockup to shut down our state,” said the skiing Sullivan.
Before pretended to ski off he tossed an anti-Schumer poster on the ground.
Roughly half of the “Executive Orders & Actions Targeting Alaska” are procedural steps added to inflate the size of the list and increase the level of outrage. It’s to hype the imaginary war with imaginary numbers about the Biden lockup.
Announcing that something might happen and then announcing that something is going to happen and then announcing the day it happened and then announcing that something has happened is a way of turning a single action into multiple attacks on Alaska working families.
For instance, the cancellation of ANWR oil leases is mentioned six times on the Sullivan poster. There is the lease moratorium, the suspension of leases, a review of development plans, a bill to cancel leases, a delay in a report and cancellation of ANWR leases.
There are similar cases of extra entries for the Ambler Road, the Tongass National Forest and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, creating a catalog of duplication and a big number to put in press releases and recite in interviews.
Sullivan mentions the review of the Willow project Environmental Impact Statement as one of the sanctions in the war on Alaska. A second attack, he says, was the delay of the final EIS on Willow.
But Sullivan didn’t include the Biden administration approval of the Willow project in March 2023 as one of the “Actions Targeting Alaska,” an omission that makes this poster less credible than he claims.
Sullivan is free to promote a new playground or pull out his poster while he is skiing if he thinks those are good campaign videos. But he should not do it on social media sites paid for by the taxpayers.
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