The glossy, ad agency flyers featuring the luminous, Canadian Mounty handsome Kirk Stensrud on one side and the murky, out-of-focus and, apparently wicked witch of Minnetonka, Yvonne Selcer on the reverse, are piling up in House District 48A mail baskets.
Few of them come from Mr. Stensrud’s own re-election campaign to the State Legislature; most come from the Republican Party of Minnesota and an entity with a post box in Champlin calling itself the Freedom Club State PAC. The latter’s name suggests that politically mobilized nudists will come out of the closet should Mr. Stensrud and his right wing colleagues Mr. Hann and Mrs. Loon get re-elected.
The pro-Stensrud/anti-Selcer flyers scream with alarmist ink, distortion and lies about Mrs. Selcer. They are over-saturated, political pornography that Mr. Stensrud and right-wingers (wink wink, nudge nudge) presumably gets turned on by. I certainly do not recall that he has ever scolded the perpetrators of these outrageous bloviations.
For example slick “History-Making Debt,” and “Big Spender” mailers and whoppers like the one written by Solomon Poretsky and published as a letter on this news site on October 20th (in which he blames Yvonne Selcer for the Parkwood Knolls initiative to leave the Hopkins School District for the Edina District) is Texas-bold, kick-ass, gun-slinging, mechanical bull buckin,’ alternate-universe crazy.
In fact neither Mrs. Selcer nor any member of the Hopkins School Board has ever been criticized for or associated with the Parkwood Knolls issue by any Edina or Hopkins School District parent or official.
And recently, a House Republican Campaign Committee mailer claimed that Yvonne Selcer did not pay her own 2012 property taxes on time. Hennepin County tax records show otherwise. Would that Mitt Romney be as transparent and honest about tax payments as has the Selcer family.
This kind of spit balling enabled Mr. Stensrud to barely grab a new comer’s victory two years ago. It mirrors the bully tactics that intimidated the successful proponents of Eden Prairie’s recent primary school boundary changes and the attacks on moderate candidates across the country in swing districts like ours.
Like the graffiti in the means’ toilet in the back of a saloon that guys never tell their wives about, we get to read in our own homes - courtesy of Mr. Stensrud’s investors – the same class of literature -- “Yvonne is a socialist!!!” and “Lonely? Meet-up with Kirk on November 6th.”
Each time I see a Stensrud sign on Eden Prairie Road or Excelsior Boulevard, each time we get another pro-Stensrud mailer, I am reminded that Yvonne Selcer is the best choice for my Republican neighbors – for the families I’ve sat next to in church and meet up with at soccer games and the mall.
Jeff Strate lives in Eden Prairie and produces the cable TV and Internet program Democratic Visions through DFL Senate District 48.
