Dem House candidate on viral campaign ad: ‘Colonel Marvel. Reporting for duty.’
A retired Air Force colonel running for Congress in Texas seized on the success of female-led superhero film “Captain Marvel” to tout her now-viral campaign ad.
“Colonel Marvel. Reporting for duty,” Kim Olson tweeted early Thursday morning.
Colonel Marvel. Reporting for duty. pic.twitter.com/x4yTJ1lbKL
— Kim Olson Col. USAF ret. (@KimOlsonTx) June 20, 2019
{mosads}The retired colonel’s video announcing her congressional bid for Texas’s 24th District became a social media hit with more than 1.4 million views on Twitter as of Thursday.
The three-minute video depicts Olson, wearing a military jacket, walking down an airplane runway and detailing her battle to become the first female pilot in flight school.
She spoke of leading coordination efforts during the Kosovo conflict before being assigned to the Pentagon to oversee a $220 billion budget.
“Just when I thought my deployment days were over, 9/11 happened, when an airplane exploded in the Pentagon just around the corner from me,” she said in the ad. “I was sent to the front lines of Iraq to rebuild.”
Olson said she returned to the Pentagon to work on investigating sexual misconduct in Air Force and modernizing the department’s policies.
“So many of us knew how bad it was and that it had to be fixed,” she said.
After returning to Texas and joining the Texas State Guard, she founded a nonprofit organization called Grace After Fire to help veterans in need.
“Even though we had fought to open the doors for women to serve in combat, other doors were still closed when they came home,” Olson said in the video. “After multiple combat deployments, women faced staggering suicide rates, unemployment and homelessness.”
“Women who went to war to protect American streets were now living on them with their children because there was nowhere safe to go and no one to turn to,” she added.
She ends the clip with a hit at current commander in chief, President Trump.
“Now I’m running for Congress because this president is attacking everything we fought for over the years,” she said. “We didn’t choose this battle. It chose us.”
Olson is running to unseat Rep. Kenny Marchant (R) for a district north of Dallas and Fort Worth.
Politico’s Playbook newsletter noted on Tuesday that Marchant won his reelection in 2018 by 3 percentage points — his closest margin after 14 years in Congress.
Olson lost a statewide race for agriculture commissioner by 5 points last year.
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