US Senate candidate’s fishing faux pas exposes her lack of authenticity
Kelly Tshibaka can’t get away from that one time at fish camp.
I didn’t plan to write a follow-up article about Kelly Tshibaka’s campaign to unseat Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. I am an acupuncturist in New Hampshire. I should be writing about acupuncture’s role in public health. Yet I can’t look away from Alaska politics because Kelly Tshibaka is married to my former buddy from high school (emphasis on the word former). I am amused that Kelly can’t get away from some controversy about a fishing license.
I explained in my first article that Kelly Tshibaka and her husband, Niki, are part of Donald Trump’s fundamentalist Christian base. Tshibaka is Trump’s yes woman. She supports the lie that the 2020 election was rigged. I was more than concerned when she polled strongly against Murkowski when she threw her hat in the ring. Seeing the Tshibaka name in the news brought back bad memories from high school. Niki Tshibaka and I were close friends until he thought his job was to be a fanatical youth pastor. Our friendship ended because I didn’t want him to control me or push his religious beliefs on me. That didn’t stop Niki from contacting me years after high school.
Last summer, Kelly Tshibaka was issued a $270 fishing citation by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. She failed to get the required commercial fishing license when she shot a campaign video at an Alaska fish camp. Not only that, Tshibaka did not have permission to use the location or the boat featured in her video. The owner of the fish camp and the owner of the boat both told reporters that they support Senator Murkowski. Neither of them would have granted Tshibaka permission to use the land or boat if they knew she was making a video to promote her campaign.
To be honest, I didn’t think much about Kelly Tshibaka’s fishing violation because I thought that it would blow over. That hasn’t happened. Months later, every news article about her seems to come back to that one time at fish camp. Even a recent article reporting Lisa Murkowski’s ability to out fundraise Tshibaka brings up the fishing scandal. Senator Murkowski stated in an interview on CNN that “Alaskans take their fishing seriously.” While Murkowski claims she doesn’t care about Tshibaka’s fishing license and residency issues, she remarks that others do care about it. Murkowski has a point. Voters want their candidates to be somewhat authentic. Running for office in a rural state and pretending to know about the great outdoors is a bit of a red flag.
This points to a deeper issue about Tshibaka and her connection to The Last Frontier. Sure, Tshibaka grew up in Alaska. That shields her from being labeled as a carpetbagger. However, she left Alaska when she was a teenager and she spent the majority of her adult life working for the Federal Government in Washington DC. She moved back to Alaska in 2019 to serve as the Commissioner of the Department of Administration. Less than two years later she expects Alaskans to send her back to Washington to represent them in the Senate.
In New Hampshire, we’ve seen our fair share of carpetbaggers over the last decade. In 2018, Maura Sullivan moved to New Hampshire from our nation’s capital to run for Congress. Much loved progressive Congresswoman Carol-Shea Porter decided to retire leaving the seat wide open. Sullivan assumed that her time at the Veterans Administration and Department of Defense under President Obama was all of the street cred she needed to win a competitive primary.
Sullivan got plenty of side-eye from both establishment and progressive Democrats who were still divided by the 2016 Presidential Primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Sullivan lost the Democratic primary to our current congressman, Representative Chris Pappas. He is the third-generation owner of a popular Manchester restaurant called The Puritan.
In 2014, former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown crossed the border and clinched the NH GOP nomination to challenge Democratic Senator Jeanne Sheehan for her Senate seat. After he lost that election, he puttered around a bike shop on the New Hampshire Seacoast. In 2017, Donald Trump appointed him to serve as the US Ambassador to New Zealand.
Just this month, Scott Brown’s wife, Gail Huff Brown, announced her intentions to run for Congress against incumbent Rep. Pappas. New Hampshire is a small state. I am hoping to meet up with Gail and Scott Brown. I’d like to ask what it was like to live in the safest country on earth during the worst days of a global pandemic. Who governed better? Was it Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who eradicated COVID in her country? Or was it the guy who nearly died of COVID while sitting in the Oval Office?
Like I said above, I was concerned when Kelly Tshibaka announced her Senate campaign with the endorsement of Donald Trump. Now, I am just amused. From a distance, Tshibaka seems to be grasping. She is struggling to prove to Alaska voters that she’s one of them, a real Alaskan. After 2022, I hope she fades into a fuzzy background noise of political memories. The Tshibaka name can bubble up for journalists and pundits to compare her to the next wave of political opportunists. And we can all chuckle about that one time at fish camp.
