Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow faces an uphill reelection battle in her home state. Time Magazine had her polling at 38% approval rating last year. Like many of her colleagues, Stabenow may be forced to take an early retirement in a year when President Obama's statist agenda of abject progressivism has impoverished the states, unemployed many workers, and increased the national debt to $15 trillion.
She and twenty two others in the Democratic caucus face a hostile voting public, furious with a do-nothing Congress which has refused to cut costs, cut spending, or cut the crap.
With this election year looking like her last, Stabenow is attempting to don and deliver on Tea Party rhetoric. However, her walk does not measure up to her fiscal-hawk talk.
She has recently attacked agricultural subsidies as chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, but her record on earmarks suggests that she is just one more Washington pol who says one thing to her constituents at home, then votes the Washington line of busting an already bankrupting budget. Legistorm.com indicates that Stabenow has sponsored $3 billion dollars in pork to her state. Hardly a Tea Party stalwart.
Stabenow is also trying to dress herself up as a Blue Dog Democrat, fighting profligate spending; she even campaigned on her support for a Balanced Budget Amendment, yet she reneged on the pledge after her 2006 reelection. She voted for ObamaCare, an outrageous entitlement which robs Medicare and threatens to drag this nation down the road to state-managed serfdom.
One of the most impassioned appellants of the failing auto industry, she supported the tax-payer funded bailout of General Motors, an unfair abused of state funds which inadvertently punished thriving automotive companies while forcing taxpayers to play shareholder to a failing company which has not broken free of overgenerous benefits to rapacious unions.
Her support for the Fairness Doctrine in talk radio is and affront the First Amendment. She has authorized the ban for oil-drilling in the Great Lakes, a move that would free up energy and free the United States from energy dependence to hostile states in Africa and the Middle East. Her positions are to the left of the nations and of little support to her constituents in Michigan.
Stabenow wants to paint herself as part of the limited government solution in Washington, D.C., yet her spending, her allegiance to the President on failed domestic policies, and her continued support for cap-and-trade (minus any meaningful legislation all detail her as unfit to continue for another term as junior senator for the Great Lakes State.