Good Move or Campaign Tactic Overload?

It seems as though for the last several weeks I’ve been receiving at least three or four (though often more) mailings from various campaigns everyday. As a post over at Raising Kaine points out, one of the mailings I received along with other residents of the 40th House of Delegates district was a letter written by Paula Hugo which talks about her husband’s (Tim Hugo) stance on women’s rights. It also paints a picture of how the Hugo family is just an everyday family that was bothered by the extremely negative campaign that Tim’s opponent, Rex Simmons, has been running. Given what I know about her husband and the sometimes grossly negligent attack ads by Rex Simmons’ campaign, I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the integrity of what Paula has to say in her letter.

What I did find to be extremely interesting, however, that in today’s mail there was also a letter from Sevea O’Brien — wife of Sen. Jay O’Brien. The letter is very similar to the one written by Paula Hugo and even starts off by saying “I’m writing you today because I think your family is probably a lot like mine.” It then goes on to criticize Jay’s “opponent’s attack mailings” and gives a personal account of the Senator’s background.

When you look at both of the letters separately, they are a great way of allowing voters to associate with the candidates and potentially go vote for them. Since they both arrived on the same day, however, it gives off the impression that the candidates might have just been sitting around a board room table and one of them said “hey, why don’t we have our wives send out a pre-typed letter so that we look like family men.” (For those of you who can’t take a joke, note that there’s a little bit of sarcasm there).

Don’t just take my word for it though, take a look at the letters a see for yourself. I’ve uploaded the letter from Sevea O’Brien here and you can see the one from Paula Hugo posted at Raising Kaine by following this link.