We're not going to lie: we don't think this is going to go down as a series of "happy accidents" over in Champaign at the Mike Frerichs campaign headquarters.
As a reminder, more than 10 days ago, the Frerichs' campaign gleefully put out their "Eco-Ag" plan with accompanying infographic. They sent it via email blast. They posted it to their Facebook Wall. They posted it on their campaign site.
The problem? It was chocked-full of errors, mistakes, and problems. The biggest one? Oh...that's too sweet to share here. We'll post on that shortly.
But...what did they do? They've fixed some of these since we called them on it, but not all of them yet.
Mistake 1: They had a random period that they needed to remove.
Mistake 2: They used the word 'effect' instead of 'affect'.
Mistake 3: In successive sentences, they used "the state's" and "the State's". They still don't know which one is proper.
Mistake 4: They forgot to hyphenate their descriptor. It isn't "Small scale". It is "Small-scale".
Mistake 5: They used "compliment" instead of "complement".
Now...if you were a sophomore in high school and you were writing a term paper on "How to Kill a Mockingbird", then these would just be sloppy mistakes. Probably went to fast and didn't check your work closely.
But...when you are running for Statewide office in Illinois and this appears to be your signature program that ties together one of your interests (the environment) to the job you want (State Treasurer), there's no way this could have been rushed. In fact, it probably got worked on all summer.
And they still made these errors? That's not sloppy. That's not lazy. That's just dumb.
And we can tolerate a lot in our politicians: ambitious, hard-charging. Hell...we can even tolerate aloofness. But we here in Illinois can't tolerate dumb.
