It’s not that Sen. Claire McCaskill is above reproach. The Missouri Democrat has been tone deaf on issues like private planes and luxury motor homes. She’s politically left of the state she represents, yet somehow manages to regularly anger progressives. She likely wouldn’t be in office at all if her last Republican challenger hadn’t self-destructed.
But these are normal knocks for a politician. What’s happening on the other side of Missouri’s Senate race right now is something different.
I’ve covered politics for 30 years, and Josh Hawley’s campaign is the most fundamentally dishonest one I’ve ever seen.
The worst element of that dishonesty — his stunning duplicity on health care — has already drawn reams of national media attention. But it’s worth recapping.
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Hawley, McCaskill’s current Republican challenger and Missouri’s attorney general, has joined a multistate lawsuit to eliminate Obamacare. That could jeopardize insurance coverage for a million or more Missourians with pre-existing medical conditions.
Facing public outrage, Hawley issued a mendacious, up-is-down ad in which he reveals that his young son has a pre-existing condition, vaguely claims to be the true protector of such patients, and alleges McCaskill doesn’t care.
“You deserve a senator who’s driven to fix this mess,” says the candidate who is literally suing to take people’s coverage away.
The ad drew coast-to-coast howls, and demands for Hawley to explain how he would cover pre-existing conditions — a vexing problem because such coverage is inherently unprofitable for insurance companies. Hawley’s eventual answer: The federal government can just take those patients off the companies’ hands.
McCaskill “should quit playing politics with our health care,” Hawley wrote in the same essay in which he proposed a full-scale government takeover of the medical coverage of millions of the most expensive patients in the market with no mention of how to pay for it.
Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) isn’t stupid. So draw your own conclusions about whether he’s truly this clueless on health care — or is just betting that voters are.
McCaskill last week retweeted a blog post by her memoirist, former Post-Dispatch reporter Terry Ganey, that hits Hawley for his original misleading commercial, and for using “his son’s medical condition as a prop.”
The furious Twitter-storm Hawley subsequently unleashed at McCaskill may well have been prompted by genuine parental anger. Nonetheless, it’s as misleading as the original ad.
Hawley, without specifying that McCaskill was re-tweeting someone else’s writing, accuses her of “calling my son a prop” (Ganey’s piece doesn’t exactly say that), and of calling his son’s medical condition “a lie” (it doesn’t say that at all).
Then Hawley demands: “Don’t ever belittle my son … don’t ever ridicule my family.”
Nothing remotely like that is in the piece. That’s a whole-cloth fabrication.
“Do you have no sense of decency?” tweet-fumes the man who is falsely accusing a grandmother of attacking her opponent’s kid.
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. The signs were there from the start.
Hawley won the attorney general’s office with an ad deriding ladder-climbing politicians “using one office to get another.” Then he did exactly that, announcing his Senate bid just 10 months into his term.
He has strained to paint McCaskill as an urbane elitist. Never mind that he is a Kansas City-area native and Ivy League-educated former Supreme Court law clerk who practiced law in Washington before returning to Missouri and running for statewide office — while she is a Rolla native who waitressed her way through Mizzou, then worked up the local political ranks for years. His bungled challenge for her to debate him on “a flatbed truck” was a comedy of rural condescension.
Less comedic is Hawley’s complicity in the latest phony bombshell from Project Veritas, the right-wing fraudsters who go around doing hidden-camera “stings” of Democrats. These are the bottom-feeders who got caught last year peddling a false statutory rape claim to The Washington Post in a pathetic attempt to trick them into printing fake news.
They are professional liars. And Hawley is eagerly helping spread their garbage.
Project Veritas last week “exposed” McCaskill telling an interviewer that, yes, she favors gun control — which is her long-held public position. Watching it, you half expect them to “expose” that she’s a Democrat, too.
Other footage shows low-level young McCaskill staffers being prompted by a Project Veritas “journalist” (and if I could put 10 quotation marks around that word, I would) to say McCaskill’s campaign tries to woo moderates. Oh no!
Project Veritas gamely tries to present this mash-up as damning, but in fact it’s unintentionally hilarious. You wouldn’t know that from Hawley’s craven re-tweeting of it, though. “So cynical it’s shocking,” he says in one.
Cynical, indeed.
In this age of sharply polarized politics, when virtually every question seems to be about left or right, this race is different. This one is about truth or lies.
Kevin McDermott is a member of the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board.
@kevinmcdermott
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