Armed with both a transcript and an MP3 of last Saturday’s West Virginia debate between Jerry Kilgore and Lt. Governor Tim Kaine, I’ve been reviewing the whole thing. I’ve found it pretty interesting. Jerry Kilgore’s nasty tenor really doesn’t come across in the transcript, but when listening to the audio, the contrast between Kaine’s even keel and Kilgore’s catty swipes is particularly stark.
I’ve excerpted some audio clips from the debate. Think of them as Cliff’s Notes versions — I’ve cut out long silence, unnecessary bits, things that bore me, etc., reducing exchanges to what I figure is their essence. There’s no audio equivalent of “…”, so just know that they’ve been sliced up.
Here’s the first one, the one that surprised me the most. I knew, while liveblogging the debates, that Jerry Kilgore had asserted that Richmond schools were, under Kaine’s leadership, the worst in the state. Despite a good bit of research, I just can’t find anything to back that up. State education data, in fact, makes clear that there was great improvement in the Richmond schools while Kaine was on Council, although it’s not obvious to me why Kaine deserves credit for what their school board did. Anyhow, I’d chalked it up to just a slip of the tongue on Kilgore’s part. Maybe he’d meant to say something else.
Whoa. No way was that an accident. Kilgore spent a total of 1:06 repeating this lie over and over again. It’s beyond deliberate, having moved into the realm of hypnotic repetition.
Is Kilgore’s staff steering him wrong? Or did he knowingly tell this whopper, figuring that the press wouldn’t bother to check up on it? Why would he feel the need to lie?
For that matter, why didn’t the press fact check this? This is a big question: what is the role of the press in covering this race, if not sorting through the rhetoric and telling us what’s true and what’s not?
Yeah when I listen to that, Kilgore does come across as catty.
Hyperbole? Of course. Even so, not everything is rosy in River City. Here,
we read about Wilder’s latest outburst regarding the RPS.
It’s better today than it once was (better than, say, during the Kaine
years?), but the system still has a ways to go before it becomes
“average.”
There’s a difference between hyperbole (ie, “Richmond schools perform terribly”) and a lie (ie, “Richmond has the second-worst-performing school in the nation”).
Hyperbole happens. That’s cool. But Kilgore told a lie, and it told it a good four times, in great detail each time. That’s not cool.
I think he said that Richmond schools were the second worst performing schools in the enitre STATE.
Regardless, it’s a completely weak argument. I mean, Kaine and Warner presid over the best managed state in the Nation, with the second best jobs performance and one of the best economic turnaround stories in history.
Kilgore’s point is old, tired, worn and weak.
He sounds catty, but I think that’s because he’s a nothing of a candidate being fed hate by a carpetbagger campaign manager.
Thanks, Josh, I didn’t mean to put words in his mouth — I was just coming up with a hypothetical bit of hyperbole that would fit the bill.