New Dog, Same Old Tricks

Rob Wasinger, a former chief-of-staff to Sen. Sam Brownback, is now a candidate for Congress in Kansas’ first congressional district.

He’s a relatively new dog who has already learned — or at least enabled — one of the oldest tricks in the political playbook, namely: Parrot national party talking points, no matter how out of context and misleading they might be.

In an email from Wasinger’s campaign I received today, soliciting a contribution, the candidate (his consultants) wrote:

[Sonia] Sotomayor has a liberal track record and is just the type of “empathetic” judge President Obama wants sitting on the Supreme Court to help advance his dangerous agenda.

Just how liberal is she?

In 2001, Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

In case recipients of Wasinger’s solicitation don’t connect the dots, the young candidate and team go on to interpret Sotomayor’s words as dismissive of both the Constitution and the enduring principle of “blind” justice. In doing so, Wasinger and team prove themselves to be dismissive of the context of Sotomayor’s words, which even forced Rod Dreher to admit he was out of line.

Still the new dog plays an old trick to stir the seething stew.

You could argue that I should be numb to these tactics by now; they are, after all, a standard part of campaigning and all political parties use them. But with or without precedent, employed by all the bridge jumpers or not, I’m naive enough to continue believing that the steady application of spade-calling to these tactics might just someday make some candidate somewhere pause — and think twice — before misrepresenting reality to raise a buck or win a vote.