Another Lily Wu for mayor ad shows up on a government-funded Facebook page. What gives? | Opinion
Well, it happened again.
Three months after the city-owned and funded Botanica got publicly embarrassed for sharing a Lily Wu for mayor campaign ad, Exploration Place did the same thing.
The latest governmental faux pas featured not one, not two, but three pictures of Wu and friends at the free 5k fitness walk/run that Exploration Place holds each Saturday.
“Thank you for joining us for Exploration Place parkrun, Lily Wu!” the museum’s Facebook page enthused, tossing in a link to the Lily Wu for Mayor Facebook page for good measure.
Needless to say this shouldn’t be happening. These agencies are prohibited by law from using public resources for political campaigning, including their e-mail, text messaging, websites and social media pages.
On the upside, Exploration Place was quick to acknowledge a mistake was made and move to fix it.
People who handle social media for the science museum scrape the Internet for positive mentions of the facility and routinely share them, said Adam Smith, chief executive of Exploration Place, which is owned by the city and funded by the county.
As soon as Smith found out about the Wu ad, he ordered the shared post deleted, and reminded his staff of their responsibility not to post campaign content on official pages, no matter how harmless the content may seem.
What he didn’t try to do was cover it up. And that’s refreshing.
When the same thing happened at Botanica in late April, board president and former City Council member Janet Miller initially said the group’s page had been hacked.
She ultimately had to admit she made that up in an attempt to shield former Botanica director Marty Miller (no relation) from embarrassment. Although he’s retired, Marty Miller still had the keys to Botanica’s Facebook page.
I think part of the reason this is happening is it’s pretty easy to mistake Wu’s mayoral campaign for something else entirely.
To date, the campaign’s strategy has been like feeding voters saccharine straight from the packet. Incredibly sweet, no calories.
Wu’s campaign appears to believe the path to victory is her dressing smartly and having her picture taken with all the right people at all the right events, and then posting them on social media.
It’s a strategy bolstered by wild spending on slick, almost-daily mailers that are essentially devoid of substantive policies that anyone might disagree with.
The only substantial campaign promise I’ve found floating on this sea of platitudes is this from a Wu mailer: “Lily will stand up to the political insiders’ sweetheart, back-room deals that benefit the few at the expense of the many.”
If Wu does become mayor, I’ll be holding her to that. It’s one of Wichita’s biggest problems.
But it’s going to be a hard promise for Wu to keep, given that her base support comes from outfits like the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee, and Americans for Prosperity, a political front group for Koch Industries that’s behind much of the pro-Wu mail blitz.
By anyone’s definition, the Chamber PAC and AFP are the political insiders that Wu says she intends to stand up to.
Although advance voting has already begun for the Aug. 1 primary, we won’t know who’s paying for Wu’s campaign spending — or anyone elses’ — until next Monday.
The reporting deadline is only a week before election day because that’s the way our Legislature set it up. It’s specifically designed to give the press and public as little time as possible to figure out who’s paying for politicians before the votes are cast.
And we’ll never know what Americans for Prosperity is spending on Wu’s candidacy, other than “a lot.”
In another feature-not-a-glitch of state campaign-finance law, AFP is exempt from any reporting of its political donors or expenditures.
That’s not Wu’s fault, of course. The state’s campaign-finance laws carry over to “cities of the first class,” of which Wichita is one.
A former TV news reporter, Wu might be the watchdog on insider deals her mailer claims her to be. I certainly hope she is.
But to get there, she’d have to bite an awful lot of the hands that are currently feeding her campaign.
