July 21, 2017 12:30 PM UTC

You Call That A Disclaimer, George Brauchler?

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• by: Colorado Pols

An issue that crops up frequently in political races concerns the use of a candidate’s image in military uniform in materials promoting their election–along with information about their service record, rank held, etc. Department of Defense regulations are quite specific about regulating this, obliging candidates for office to clearly state that the use of such images and information does not imply an endorsement by the DoD:

Any such military information must be accompanied by a prominent and clearly displayed disclaimer that neither the military information nor photographs imply endorsement by the Department of Defense or their particular Military Department (or the Department of Homeland Security for members of the Coast Guard); e.g., “John Doe is a member of the Army National Guard. Use of his military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform does not imply endorsement by the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.”

You’ll recall that last year, then-Denver7 reporter Marshall Zelinger caught a bunch of Republican candidates, from Rep. Mike Coffman to Senate candidate Jon Keyser, using service photos with no DoD-required disclaimers whatsoever–which those candidates quickly corrected after attracting that negative press attention.

We’ve had a few occasions recently to cite 2018 GOP gubernatorial candidate George Brauchler as an example of poor online campaign execution. From letting opponents dominate Google search responses from Brauchler via better optimization to other amateurish website problems, he’s just done a crappy job online best practices-wise. With that in mind, you’ve probably seen this banner advertisement for Brauchler’s campaign now playing at the top of our website in heavy rotation:

You’ll notice that the left side of this banner ad contains a photo of Brauchler in a United States Army uniform. Now, of course we know from the above DoD policy that all such photos need to have a “prominent and clearly displayed disclaimer” stating clearly that the photo doesn’t imply any endorsement. If you look closely at the photo in this banner, you can see what looks like text in the photo–text that could be the required DoD disclaimer.

Too bad you can’t read it:

There are plenty of ways to describe this, but “prominent and clearly displayed disclaimer” is definitely not one of them! The Surgeon General’s warnings on cigarettes would have love to have a loophole like this. But seriously, folks–it’s totally illegible, which makes it totally non-compliant with DoD regulations. Yes, we get that it’s an amateurish mistake, just the latest in a series of such gaffes from Brauchler.

In fact, that’s kind of the point. As a district attorney running for governor, attention to detail and playing by the rules should be Brauchler’s calling cards. Instead, Brauchler has lost two high-profile cases since jumping into the political fray, failed pitifully at raising money out of the gate, and now appears to have just stepped on one of the most avoidable landmines (no pun intended) in electoral politics.

If you want to be taken seriously as a gubernatorial candidate, you need to (no nice way to say it) suck less.