Neel Kashkari Campaign Flier Claims He's a 'Conservative Republican'

The Los Angeles Times reports that moderate Republican Neel Kashkari’s first campaign mail flier, reaching homes throughout California soon, will tout that he is a “conservative Republican,” and a “political outsider.”

Kashkari – who voted for Obama in 2008 and is in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, gay marriage, and abortion rights – hardly falls on the side of what most would consider a conservative. Presciently, Breitbart News contributor Jon Fleischman predicted on May 1 that Kashkari will be tracking right in his GOP mailers and will promote himself as a conservative. 

Moreover, Kashkari’s strategic role as a treasury official in the George W. Bush administration’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which bailed out failing banks to the tune of $700 billion, wouldn’t exactly make him a political outsider. The mailer creates a positive spin on Kashkari’s role in all of this by saying, “He’s helped Silicon Valley high tech companies grow and create California jobs. He worked for the U.S. Treasury under President Bush, helping to lead our nation through the 2007 financial crisis.”

Nevertheless, the flier asserts that “Neel Kashkari will start strong and stand up to the career politicians to end the wasteful spending that got us in this mess.”  The mailer displays a picture of Kashkari holding an ax about to pulverize a small toy train on a tree stump as a symbolic act of Kashkari’s main campaign idea that he will work to abolish Jerry Brown’s “bullet train.”  Kashkari asserts in the mailer that “The first thing on his chopping block? The high-speed crazy train.”