Websites Speak Volumes About Ward 2 Council Candidates

by P.D. Lesko

Sex sells. It’s a tried and true marketing tool that has been used since, well, forever. Gallup & Robinson, an advertising and marketing research firm, has conducted multiple studies and determined that the use of sex in advertising results in significantly above-average success in communicating with consumers. Ward 2 Council candidate Sally Hart Petersen has been tweaking and refining her campaign website, particularly the “More About The Issues” section. Many of her answers are the same ones she offered in the June 2012 A2Politico Q & A she did. It’s a good read. Petersen even demonstrated her sense of humor when she posted an A2Politico bit of satire in which she stars to her campaign Facebook page with the comment: “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.— e.e cummings.”

A trip to visit Sally Petersen’s website and Ward 2 incumbent Tony Derezinski’s website, and one sees immediately which of them in actually running for office, and it isn’t the incumbent.

While Petersen has been tweaking and fine-tuning her campaign message, Derezinski has posted nothing to his campaign website since May 28, 2012, when he slapped up the de riguer photo with Representative John Dingell.

It’s unclear when the members of the Hieftje Hive Mind Collective are going to get the message that while Representative Dingell is a lifelong Democrat (unlike a recent Hieftje drone Mr. Dingell agreed to endorse in 2011), he is not an Ann Arbor Democrat. Progressive political magazine Mother Jones regularly rolled its eyes and ragged on Representative Dingell for his refusal to push Detroit’s Big Three on emissions and fuel efficiency standards. When Dingell was forced into a run-off against former Representative Lynn Rivers, the Sierra Club and Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed Rivers.

Dingell was quoted in a recent interview as still “relishing” the drubbing he gave to Rivers. He’s not the only one who remembers Rivers’s defeat. There are loads of Ann Arbor Democrats who relish drubbing Dingell in the comment sections of the Detroit and Ann Arbor news sites. Mr. Dingell’s endorsement wasn’t weighty enough to save former Republican Stephen Rapundalo, Derezinski’s colleague on City Council for the past two terms, from a drubbing at the hands of Jane Lumm.

Despite the obvious fact that Dingell, unlike sex, does not sell in Ann Arbor as well as one would imagine, there’s Council member Derezinski, Tony D. to his online fans, in a political embrace with John Dingell in front of the Stadium Bridge, no less. Derezinski’s campaign website is still full of blank pages and stale content. He’s electronically A.W.O.L. Given the fact that he has one of the worst attendance records on City Council, has sponsored almost no resolutions, and busied himself primarily with voting in lock-step with Borg Queen Hieftje on everything from parkland grabs to refusing to spend surplus funds to reinstate lost citizen services, drone Derezinski’s campaign website is, well, just about what you’d expect.

Meanwhile, over at e-Chez Petersen, Sally puts her Harvard MBA and marketing savvy to work. Her tagline is rather clever: “A Fresh Voice for Ward 2.” However, line up Sally P. and Tony D. side-by-side and the comparisons prompt one to mentally change Petersen’s tagline to: “A Fresh Face for Ward 2.”

Below, watch this wonderful video of Petersen’s golf swing. You’ve got Derezinski (above), who comes off looking like a wax effigy of a 70s era politico. Then, below, you have the Real Thing. In her video, Petersen’s poised, athletic, smart and well, alive and engaged in a way that Derezinski can never hope to be in his crotchety, old-school, black-suited photo opp. with Representative Dingell.