Candidate Paul Dale pulled the “Hitler” and “white supremacist” cards out of the deck in trying to flip House District 29 — Kenai — to the Democrats.
In what critics are calling the dirtiest gutter politics seen on the Peninsula this election cycle, Dale said Rep. Ben Carpenter believes Hilter was not a white supremacist.
That is not what Carpenter said, but the lawmaker learned a good lesson the day he gave an interview to the Anchorage Daily News. The story rolled out with the Hitler narrative and went around the mainstream media far and wide.
What Carpenter actually said was that fear drives bad decisions, and the Legislature was being driven into bad decisions over COVID-19 by their fear, in the same way that Hitler was driven by his fear of “others” who were not Germans. Carpenter could have said it more eloquently, he later admitted.
In fact, most of the people Hitler killed were some version of caucasian — many of them were gypsies, homosexuals and disabled people. The racial makeup of Jews is a complicated and fascinating story of the history of humanity.
But Dale didn’t want to discuss facts; he was busy smearing Carpenter as a racist.
Dale is running as a pretend independent for the House seat, but all of his supporters are Democrats and he is paying thousands of dollars to the Alaska Democratic Party for campaign support.
His “Hilter” accusations about Carpenter are such personal and vicious attacks that former Alaska Republican Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock raised the question about why Dale has allowed himself to be used by the Democrats this way.
“Why are the Democrats not running on issues? Why is every Democrat campaign a personal attack on their opponents. It’s because the Democrat platform is deeply unpopular,” Babcock said.
It’s possible that the viciousness is matched by the odds of Dale winning: Only two districts in the state have fewer Democrats than District 29 — District 30 and District 8. It’s a safe seat for a Republican, which is why Dale may be reaching deep into the bag of dirty tricks to deceive voters.
Linking Carpenter to white supremacy because he understands history with more nuance than most is akin to calling Dale a supporter of child sacrifice because he supports state-funded abortion, Babcock said.
