I have not authored the usual number of unethical campaign tactics indictments this time around. One reason is that their desperation while facing an almost certain GOP wipe-out has led Democratic Party candidates into far more questionable devices than the confident Republicans as the Blues have increasingly defaulted to race-baiting, Koch brothers attacks, scare-mongering on everything from guns to contraception, and the “war on women” chorus. Combine that with the popular integrity breach of Democratic incumbants virtually pretending that they never heard of the Democratic President in the White House, and I was faced with giving more ammunition to those who accuse me of partisan bias. Looking at the poll projections, it appears that the worst offenders—Wendy Davis, Allison Grimes, Mark Udall, and Mary Landrieu among them—will get their just desserts from voters without additional alarms from me.
Speaking of desserts: this campaign tactic is worthy of note. A loyal Rhode Island reader inquires if I have any ethical problems with the campaign of Allen Fung, the Chinese-American GOP candidate in the closely contested Rhode Island governor’s race, delivering thousands of fortune cookies to Rhode Island Chinese restaurants that look like this when you open them
So your Ethics Alarms Pre-Election Ethics Quiz is the question asked of me:
Is there anything unethical about this?
My verdict: there is, but I love it anyway, for the following reasons:
- It is unapologetically ethnic and politically incorrect. (Imagine the uproar if Fung’s opponent planted cookies with the opposite message in non-Chinese restaurants!)
- It is clever, and made me laugh, and believe me, do I ever need a laugh right now…
- It has been so long since a message in a fortune cookie wasn’t insipid that I appreciate anything out of the ordinary.
What’s unethical about it? The campaign fortune cookie has the same ethical problem as the rock singer who harangues his captive audience about global warming or the Iraq war. It’s a bait and switch. Customers go to a concert for the music and a restaurant for the food, not partisan endorsements. It is unfair to subject paying cutsomersto political messages and electioneering…unless, of course, it is reasonably certain that the message won’t annoy anyone. I don’t think the restaurant can be sure of that. During an election like this one, people go to restaurants to escape the din.
I see nothing unethical about Fung’s campaign distributing the cookies, however.
______________________
Pointer: King Kool
Graphic: WPRO
Ethics Alarms 
A minority in the GOP?
Those don’t exist. Something’s wrong here.
Maybe his last name is Fung, but he’s really Irish.
Perhaps. I still doubt the facts of the story. Maybe it’s an allegory. Has anyone checked to see if this “Rhode Island” is for real? And not just an allegorical land such as Lilliput?
No, no “Rhode Island” is for real, Tex. You remember it…a county in Northeast Texas, just North and East of Tarrant County.
Is that the land that Wendy Davis governs?
I’ve seen those Tolkien-esque maps of the region called “New England”, just north of the “Middle Colonies” (how quaint), and indeed I found this “Rhode Island”. But IT’S NOT AN ISLAND….fantastic.
To answer your question, No, Wendy governs a land called “La-La-Land” where, in order to win her election, she had to go to sleep. She only won “in her dreams”.
Bazinga
It is the mystical land of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations… “Rhodes” is indeed an island (although the natives call it Aquidneck), while the plantations of Providence sit comfortably on the mainland!
Well, I’ve been educated.
O’Fung?
McFung?
Maybe make him a Scotsman?
But he’d be no true Scotsman…
Well, no, but…
Whew! You dodged a bullet on that one. I was all ready to explain why this is funny and ethical but that people with no sense of humor would not be able to see that.
You know what? I think you nailed this one.
When I heard about this, I didn’t decouple the frustration I would feel getting a fortune cookie of this kind from the device itself. If Fung wanted to just hand out fortune cookies as Vote for Me buttons, that’s fine. But giving them out at restaurants ensures the customers leave with a bad experience regarding both him and the restaurant, so I still think that’s a bad idea.
Thanks, I think. Are you that surprised that nailed one?
No, if I had written something about this one right after hearing about it, I probably would have been way off-base. You cut to the heart of it, in that using a fortune cookie in itself isn’t by itself unethical. It just shows how burned out I get at the end of election season that I wouldn’t have made clear analysis.
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