Sharper Point: GOP needs to go back to drawing board on Mark Kelly

There was a movie out more than a decade ago called Failure to Launch. In it, Matthew McConaughey plays a man who “fails to launch” – by not moving out of his parents’ house. NFL great Terry Bradshaw played his dad in the movie — which made me want to like the movie. Except, it was an awful film.

Really awful. Even my wife, who loves really bad TV shows, hated the movie.

No matter how bad Failure To Launch was, it doesn’t come close to the Republican Party’s lame attempt to use the term “failure to launch“ in ads attacking retired astronaut and current U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kelly. Kelly, a Democrat, made his first campaign appearance in Phoenix on Sunday.

Based on what he talked about, I’m probably not going to agree with Mark Kelly on a lot of the issues. But I know I don’t agree with this lame Republican ad, which was first featured as a Snapchat filter. It depicts a cartoon Kelly in a spacesuit watching a cartoon rocket crash.

I might not agree with a lot of Mark Kelly’s Senate campaign platform but I *KNOW* I don’t agree with this crap that the @GOP is putting out. pic.twitter.com/lbXQuyiIF8

— Jim Sharpe (@JimSharpe) February 25, 2019

“MARK KELLY’S FAILURE TO LAUNCH”

Get it?! Hahahahahahahahahhaha! *ahem*

Yeah — not really funny when you consider that 17 NASA astronauts have lost their lives in spacecraft.

Do I don’t think the Republican National Committee wants Mark Kelly (or any current astronauts) to literally crash?  No. Nor am I completely incensed by this ad.

However, it does point out some hypocrisy.

Last fall, Steve Benson, the former cartoonist for the Arizona Republic, drew a cartoon that depicted then-Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema shooting down then-Senate candidate Martha McSally.

McSally, of course, was the first female fighter pilot to fly combat missions for the U.S.

That Benson cartoon was in poor taste but some of the people who were outraged by that will see no problem with cartoon rockets crashing in front of cartoon astronauts.

Those people are partisan hacks.

And maybe they need to look at it this way: Kelly didn’t just fly in the shuttle. He flew combat missions for the U.S. Navy during the Gulf War. Would this ad be considered cute or clever if it showed a cartoon jet crashing on the deck of a cartoon aircraft carrier with the words “Mark Kelly’s campaign crashed and burned”?

You just know some older dudes, in a boardroom at the Republican National Headquarters, are slapping each other on the back saying, “What a great concept! And we’re reaching the kids by putting it on the…what do they call it? Oh yeah – the Snapper Chat!”

McSally, who will likely face Kelly in 2020, should probably ask the Republican Party to knock it off. She doesn’t need this kind of help. Back in my consulting days, I worked with Republican candidates who grew weary of their national party’s “help” at times.

But if the RNC insists on pumping out stuff like this, maybe she should just ask them nicely to make these words (which also appear in the ad) the biggest words on the page: “Paid for by the Republican National Committee. Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

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