Jerry Kilgore got caught making shit up™ again. I love it. First, Bob Lewis writes for the AP:
Republican gubernatorial nominee Jerry Kilgore accused the Virginia Department of Transportation of delaying hundreds of millions of federal highway dollars and wiping out an entire season of road construction in Virginia–a claim transportation experts denounced as categorically false.
[…]
Kilgore’s campaign could not cite a specific project delay as an example or say which entire construction season had been missed.
And in the Post, Mike Shear and Steven Ginsberg write:
“It should make every motorist mad to pass a half-finished project knowing that the money needed for its completion is gathering dust in Washington, D.C.,” Kilgore said. “Our urgency and effectiveness is on the decline.”
But pressed to provide examples of any projects that were delayed, aides to Kilgore later said that the candidate was only raising a red flag about an issue of concern. Spokesman Tim Murtaugh said he could not point to any particular project that was delayed.
“This is just the overarching argument,” Murtaugh said.
[…]
In fact, Virginia officials announced Tuesday that the state had been awarded an extra $30 million in federal highway funds above its original allocation.
The whole thing is a big slam at Governor Warner. The governor famously revamped VDOT, instituting organization-wide reform that includes the totally bad-ass VDOT Dashboard application, which deserves a blog entry unto itself. Attacking Warner — particularly about a demonstrably untrue charge — is tantamount political suicide. Again, from the Post:
“I don’t think it makes sense politically to be attacking a governor with over 70 percent approval ratings,” said Mark J. Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University. “It distracts the campaign from its own message. It’s not a smart strategic move, as far as I can tell.”
Authors Shear and Ginsberg write that the bizarre broadside against Warner “left political observers puzzling over the campaign’s strategy as the election season nears its end.”
Somebody had best be fired from the Kilgore campaign after such a huge, embarrassing mistake. Launching an attack like this requires that, at a bare minimum, some small percentage of the facts be on your side. The Kilgore campaign has nothing. What’s amazing to me is that (apparently) at no time did Jerry Kilgore say “hey, can I see some documentation on this before I launch a major attack?”
Not content making shit up™ about Governor Warner, Kilgore moved onto attacking Kaine in the same conference call, along the same lines as his new TV commercial. Again, from the AP:
Kilgore on Tuesday also aired a new campaign ad that accuses his Democratic rival, Tim Kaine, of advocating a gasoline tax increase in 2004, an assertion at odds with Kaine’s legislative position in that year’s bitter tax fight.
God, that’s great work on the part of Bob Lewis: “an assertion at odds with Kaine’s legislative position.” “At odds with [whatever]” is my favorite euphemism for “lying” — I can see that Lewis favors it, too.
I have to wonder if this is going to establish a new campaign narrative. Reporters may well feel like they’ve been lied to or, at best, that the Kilgore campaign doesn’t have their act together, and they’re just flailing now. That quote from the Post (“…left political observers puzzling over the campaign’s strategy as the election season nears its end”) really says it all.
This is not the Kilgore campaign’s proudest day. Here’s hoping that the November 8 will be even more disappointing to them.
ouch.