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Lentz camp goes hypocritical… to cry hypocrisy?

A simple campaign press release had never made my jaw literally drop—until I saw what Democrat Bryan Lentz’s campaign laid on my table recently.

“Lentz Campaign Calls For Meehan to Try and Win Votes with Ideas, Not Courts,” the headline screamed.

This is, of course, a reference to the fact that Republican Pat Meehan’s campaign in the 7th Congressional District has spearheaded a ballot challenge against Jim Schneller, the conservative independent candidate who got on the ballot thanks to help from Lentz allies. The controversy has made the contentious race between Lentz and Meehan even more heated.

“It is a shame how difficult it is for someone who’s demonstrated a sincere interest in being part of the democratic process to actually be on the ballot,” Lentz campaign manager Kevin McTigue said in the release. “Pat Meehan and his cohorts should be ashamed at the efforts they are going to to knock someone off the ballot who’s actually willing to say what he believes.”

Now, if you’ve been closely following this race, there’s really only one reasonable reaction to this statement: Whaa??

This is coming from the same campaign that brought ballot challenges of its own against all three of its opponents in both parties earlier this year, successfully knocking both primary challengers out of the race and unsuccessfully taking Meehan’s campaign to court over petition fraud.

Put your party affiliations and ideology aside for a second: This, my friends, is what we call hypocrisy.

Incredulous, I called up the Lentz camp, thinking maybe it was a (very) late April Fool’s joke or something. What I found out was even more confusing.

It turns out that aforementioned quote from McTigue was uttered verbatim in 2006 by one Virginia Davis, who was then a spokeswoman for Senator Rick Santorum’s campaign and is now Meehan’s spokeswoman. At the time, Davis was commenting on the fact that Democrats were challenging Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli’s spot on the ballot. The Lentz campaign quickly sent over a fact sheet full of the things Davis said about the Romanelli challenge back then, documentation it apparently had at the ready for when we Fourth Estaters called.

So, if I understand this correctly, this was some cute attempt to the bait the Meehan people into some kind of hypocrisy trap, using us unsuspecting reporters as the fishing rod. If that’s the case, they lost me on this particular one, and also left me feeling just a bit jerked around in the process.

Look, I know traps like this are set up frequently. Usually, they’re not so confusing.

But let’s look at the merits.

By throwing Davis’ 2006 quotes back at Meehan, the Lentz camp is making things more difficult for itself. If you want to call hypocrisy on the Meehan campaign for challenging Schneller (a fair point to make), just note that the very same campaign earlier this year decried ballot challenges as a waste of taxpayer money. I actually did that for them in this story. If you want to make the point that getting third-party candidates on the ballot to split the other side’s vote is standard fare for both parties (a very valid point to make), just say so. I did that for them, too.

But saying that Virginia Davis in 2006 = Pat Meehan in 2010 doesn’t hold water. In the public sphere, political spokespeople don’t actually have their own views. They speak for the candidates they represent. I know plenty PR pros who have had to forcefully advocate policies with which they don’t personally agree. If we journalists started holding these folks accountable for contradictions that arise from representing different candidates, we’d never be able to get of LexisNexis to report actually news.

More than anything else, though, going after Meehan on this subject when you’ve challenged everyone yourself and quietly helped another guy get on the ballot just seems like unnecessary rhetorical jumping jacks, an exercise that leaves the subject hanging by a substantive thread.

Next time, I hope they just say whatever they want to say.

August 27, 2010 at 11:00 am

--Dan Hirschhorn

Tags: Bryan Lentz, Jim Schneller, PA-7, Pat Meehan

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