Good: appealing to the middle class with your Senate campaign speech. Not so good: Doing it from an ultra-swanky country club.
Republican Senate hopefuls in Michigan’s Republican primary Clark Durant and Pete Hoekstra gathered at the gorgeous 93,000 square foot Shenandoah Country Club to court local Republicans at an annual dinner.
Durant sounded a message of class unity: “Let our party be the party…of the 100 percent,” he said, according to the Detroit News.
The candidate has attracted national attention recently for some of his more provocative statements about inequality. Last month, Durant suggested that the income disparity between the 99% and 1% may actually be too low.
“I think it should be wider,” he told a group of students at Calvin College, according to the Grand Rapids Press. “Does anybody think Steve Jobs should not be in the 1 percent? He made life better for the 99 percent of the rest of us. You want to create opportunities for people with their unique gifts.”
He added at the same event that Occupy Wall Street protesters should “go find a job.”
Durant did clarify later that he doesn’t favor increasing inequality, and that his “‘widening the gap’ remark, in its context, sought to challenge the students to think outside the box when they hear stock statements that pit one group of people against another.”
Hoekstra also addressed the Republicans at the club on Thursday, calling the White House’s delay of a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline “an attack on the middle class.” Democrats have been looking to target his wealth in recent weeks, putting out statements noting he’s taken $240,000 from a lobbying firm, Dickstein Shapiro, since leaving Congress.
