Hoekstra in the national spotlight: Does it help or hurt his campaign for governor?

When U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra announced his candidacy for governor in 2010 on Tim Skubick’s WKAR show “Off the Record” a few weeks ago, Skubick asked him how he planned to run for governor while still working in the House of Representatives on behalf of Michigan’s 2nd Congressional District.

“Well when you go back to Washington,” Skubick said, “you can’t be here running for governor, so one of these things has to suffer.”

“I think as you talked about earlier in your program,” Hoekstra replied, “I can multi-task. I’ve done it in the past, I can do it here.”

But over the past couple weeks, Hoekstra’s job in Washington, particularly his role as the current ranking Republican member and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has brought him a great deal of attention from the national media as he has taken on Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over her claim that the CIA misled Congress on waterboarding.

Will all that publicity help or hurt his campaign for governor here in Michigan?

Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, told Michigan Messenger in a recent interview that Hoekstra’s biggest problem is name recognition and that being on television can’t hurt in that regard. “Hoekstra is not a well known political figure in Michigan outside his congressional district,” Ballenger said. “Polls were taken earlier this year that showed he’s strong in West Michigan, but in metro Detroit and the rest of the state he’s virtually unknown. He has to get better known and get his name recognition up and he has to carve out an identity for himself.”

He noted that Dutch politicians from West Michigan traditionally have not fared well in gubernatorial races, pointing to Dick Posthumus and Dick DeVos in recent years. While Hoekstra’s recent publicity isn’t likely to hurt him with Michigan voters, Ballenger didn’t think it would help him all that much either because the attention is on an issue that is not terribly relevant to the state’s problems.

“Unfortunately for Hoekstra, his publicity and his reputation, rightly or wrongly, has been in the area of intelligence and foreign affairs, where he got a lot of attention and TV time even before the Pelosi thing ever came up. But it’s all in a subject area that is not what people really care about here in Michigan,” Ballenger said. “We’re a state that is obsessed with how we can get our economy turned around, how we can get unemployment down, how to create jobs. A lot of people may recognize his name, but they may ask what does this have to do with anything I care about?”

Where being in the public eye on this issue could help him, however, is in the Republican primary. Ballenger noted: “I don’t see it hurting his campaign, especially among Republicans and the first thing he has to do is win a primary. Obviously, Nancy Pelosi is not a popular figure with Michigan Republican voters. So if he’s on the opposite side of Pelosi on this issue, that certainly isn’t going to hurt Hoekstra.”