Campaign Mailer of Mud-Exploding Mailbox ‘Offensive’ To Muslims

COOK COUNTY, IL -- Just four months out of the November election, candidates in the contentious Cook County 17th District race are already taking off the gloves. Tempers are flaring over a political mailer sent by GOP candidate Sean Morrison, that Democratic challenger Abdelnasser Rashid is calling a “smear ad” based on “repugnant stereotypes” about Muslims and Arab Americans

The mailer showing a political cartoon of a man opening his mailbox and getting blasted in the face with mud hit voters’ mailboxes in the Cook County 17th District earlier this month. The caption reads: “Be careful when opening your mail. We don’t want any of [Rashid’s] mud to get on you.”

On the mailer’s flip side of Morrison’s mailer, the Republican incumbent contrasts himself against Rashid, whom he refers to as a currently “unemployed Harvard University graduate.” Morrison touts his security company, which he says employs over 800 employees and subcontractors, that creates “private sector jobs everyday.” Morrison also jabs Rashid of being affiliated with the “radical organization” Our Revolution, the Bernie Sanders-inspired progressive political action organization.

Recent Sean Morrison political mailer

Rashid, an Arab American and Muslim, said in a written statement that with the election less than four months away “Morrison is already spending thousands of dollars attacking me with misleading smear ads. That speaks volumes about how worried he is for his own reelection.”

“Morrison’s latest attack is a deeply offensive attempt to scare people based on repugnant stereotypes,” Rashid further states. “But voters in our communities aren’t stupid. They will view these mailers as exactly what they are--reprehensible, dishonest and desperate attempts to distract working families from the real issues they are dealing with everyday.”

Morrison, a resident of Palos Park, was selected in 2015 to fill the vacancy of former Republican Cook County Commissioner Elizabeth Gorman by 17th County Board District Republican committeeman. Morrison is currently the chairman of the Cook County Republican Party. The upcoming November election will be the first time he faces voters.

Rashid was a public administrator for Cook County Clerk David Orr’s office, until he left this month to focus on his campaign. He claims to have worked to consolidate the Cook County Recorder of Deeds Office with the county clerk’s office, “saving taxpayers at least $20 million over ten years.” The married Justice-father-of-three is running on a platform or property tax reform, affordable and quality health care, workers’ rights and other policies that prioritize working and middle class families. Rashid also pledges to address the opioid epidemic.

Morrison, who says he is opposed to the pretrial release of violent and armed offenders, drew flack for writing a letter to a Cook County judge in 2014 vouching for one of his security firm’s top executives, who was facing a pending criminal case. According to the Chicago Sun-Times Mark Brown, Morrison asked that his employee be allowed to travel out of state. The employee got arrested for allegedly trying to solicit an underaged girl on the Internet -- the same charged he was facing in Illinois.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle also singled Morrison out in a press statement demanding that fellow Republican Palos Township Tr. Sharon Brannigan, a Morrison-appointee to the Cook County Commission on Women’s Issues, step down after Brannigan made disparaging remarks about Muslims on social media. Morrison claims that Preckwinkle never bothered to call him and referred to her statement as “political grandstanding,” saying that Brannigan had already stepped down before the backlash from the Muslim community, which has dogged Brannigan at Palos Township meetings for the past year.

In a written statement to Patch, Morrison accused Rashid of playing the “ethnic card.”

The cartoon on my comparison brochure is a standard stock political image used many times before to identify typical negative campaign tactics currently employed by my opponent.

Labeling it anything other than a generic political cartoon is desperately grasping at straws.

My opponent is not the victim here despite a very weak attempt to play the ethnic card.

The taxpayers are the victims of the Our Revolution tax and spend policies and that is the message of the mailer.

Rashid is the local Chairman of Our Revolution and he cannot run away from its $2 trillion spending platform just because he has no plan to pay for it without raising property taxes, sales taxes and incomes taxes.

The entire mailer identified only the issue stances of myself and my opponent and our publicly identified backgrounds.

By accusing me of using his ethnicity to imply any link to terrorist acts, terrorist funding or terrorist organizations, he is foolishly bringing negative images upon himself that did not exist until he publicly created this false narrative.

The only true explosion here is my opponent shooting himself in the foot.

The 17th District of Cook County includes all or parts of municipalities within the townships of Bremen, Elk Grove, Lemont, Leyden, Lyons, Maine, Orland, Palos, Proviso, Worth and Riverside.