A former car dealership mogul has thrown his hat into the race to be the next governor of Michigan, intending to run against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).
Kevin Rinke is a Republican who made a fortune in the car business. He said he will put $10 million of his own into defeating Whitmer, who has spent her term in office plagued by scandals.
“Gretchen Whitmer is straight off their assembly line as a career politician. She’s a Yugo,” Rinke said in a video announcing his candidacy.
A Yugo is a car model, shaped like a box, that was made in communist Yugoslavia. It had a reputation for constantly breaking down, and is no longer made.
Rinke clarified that he was not calling Whitmer ugly when he referred to her as a Yugo.
“I was not calling the sitting governor a Yugo as it would apply to this is ‘what you look like, this is who you are,'” he said. “What I was doing, was making an analogy.”
On the issues, Rinke is a moderate Republican.
He supports the Equal Rights Amendment, which codifies certain LGBT rights into law, including recognizing transgender people as the gender they decide to be, not by the sex on their birth certificates.
He says he supports the Second Amendment but calls it “inappropriate” to carry guns in schools.
States like Ohio are working on Constitutional Carry bills that would allow teachers with a certain amount of training hours to conceal weapons.
Whitmer is ripe for a challenger after nearly two years of imposing strict COVID-19 lockdowns on Michiganders.
Most recently, she vetoed a bill that would have forgiven fines levied against businesses for breaking her COVID-19 rules.
She was often accused of breaking her own COVID-19 rules, and faced major scrutiny over her COVID-19 nursing home policy, which placed infected patients with susceptible elderly nursing home residents.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Michigan Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “Kevin Rinke” by Kevin Rinke.
