When the Truthiness Won't Set You Free

Hoo boy, this is gonna get good.

A couple of Fridays ago, the Republican candidate for Washington's junior Senator slot, Mike McGavick (going up against incumbent Dem Maria Cantwell), made some interesting confessions of "the very worst and most embarrassing things" from his life with an "open letter from Mike" posted to his campaign blog. These included his divorce from his first wife, layoffs ordered while CEO of Safeco Insurance, an inaccurate attack ad when running Slade Gorton's Senate campaign back in 1988... and, oh yeah, a DWI/DUI from 13 years ago. It garnered quite a bit of press around Washington state -- with many (including Seattle P-I columnist Robert Jamieson) giving McG props for his candor (as well as noting the political savvy of defusing a potential ticking timebomb) -- and it even made it into the national AP feed.

Well... it seems candor isn't what it used to be. The Seattle P-I looked a little deeper into his drunk-driving charge, and McG wasn't quite as forthcoming as he could have been.

Key discrepancies between the candidate's sketchy, four-sentence account of the incident and the arresting officer's report:

• McGavick wrote that he was stopped when he "cut a yellow light too close" while driving Gaelynn, now his wife, home "from several celebrations honoring our new relationship." The officer who arrested him in Bethesda, Md., on Nov. 21, 1993, wrote that he saw McGavick's Mazda Miata "drive through a steady red light."
  
  In fact, McGavick was charged with "driving through a red signal" as well as DUI.
  
  
• The candidate told the Seattle P-I last week that he was issued a citation, not arrested. A Montgomery County police spokesman said Friday that McGavick was placed under arrest, handcuffed, driven to a district police station, given a breath-alcohol test and handcuffed to a desk while he was being processed. He then was released.
  
  His car was towed from the arrest scene, the arresting officer wrote, because "McGavick's passenger was unable to drive the vehicle due to her BAC (blood-alcohol content)."
  
  
• McGavick, on his Web site and in an interview, gave a vague account of the incident that made it seem more innocuous than the police report did.
  
  The arresting officer said that when he stopped the sports car and McGavick rolled down the window, he "could detect a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage from the interior" of the car. When the officer asked McGavick how much he had had to drink, the driver replied: "Oh, I don't know -- two, maybe three beers."
  
  The officer said McGavick stumbled during several roadside sobriety tests and "swayed throughout" one test. "During processing, McGavick fell asleep," the officer wrote.

And here's the money quote from the article:

"If you're going to go the confession route in politics, make sure it's a full and accurate confession," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "Otherwise, you're defeating your own purpose and you're going to create a second spate of worse stories, which is exactly what (McGavick) has done."

First up, the P-I's Robert Jamieson, who is none to happy for being made to play the fool:

A week ago, in this column, I praised him for coming clean about a 1993 DUI in Montgomery County, Md.

McGavick's gesture, I wrote, showed that he had examined his life and talked with candor about personal successes and failures.

Boy, was I mistaken.

Who could have known that McGavick's pre-emptive confession would blast open a Pandora's box?
[...]
McGavick said he wanted to be frank to rise above the personal slings of a campaign. He wanted to change the cynical view the public has about politics.

He just fed us a carbo load of cynicism.

McGavick or his handlers take us for fools. They had to think no reporter would try to get the old police report. McGavick may have sold his own staff so well on his confession that they didn't check out the facts.

His spokesman claimed that they hadn't seen the police report before McGavick's personal data dump.

In light of recent developments, McGavick's mea culpa is troubling. No one forgets what it feels like to have cuffs slapped on, and no one confuses the color of a traffic light years after the fact unless, of course, they suffer from convenient colorblindness -- or had way too many drinks.

It makes no difference whether this is a case of selective memory or campaign ineptitude or a deft PR ploy that backfired.

The net result is the same. It makes people not believe a candidate who tried to make us believe the best about him. It makes those who smelled a rat all along even more justifiably cynical.

What's the point of candor if you aren't candid?

And now McG's forked tongue is getting extra scrutiny. Josh Feit, news editor for the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger (who would be closely scrutinizing anyways), notes that McG got away with "a total whopper" with the P-I again in a story this morning on the supposed closeness in views on the Iraq war between Cantwell and McG:

Yet while McGavick embraces Republicans who say setting a hard date for withdrawal is dangerous, he runs against the party's grain by welcoming vigorous debate on how the war has been conducted.

"Debating where we are and where we are going is always healthy," McGavick said, even when the discussion is intense and divisive.

That view differs from comments of some Republicans, including Bush, who have likened disagreement with the policy in Iraq to not supporting the troops.

Josh notes:

That might be what McGAvick wants liberal PI readers in Seattle to hear (and the reporters at the PI seem happy to let him get away with it), but I was with McGavick on the campaign trail this summer in Moses Lake, WA.—which is about 2-and-a-half-hours east of Seattle in GOP territory—and he said something completely different to the red meat (actually, doritos and chili) audience there.

Here’s a snippet from the article I wrote from Moses Lake

“We have learned things—since being there—that turned out not to be true,” McGavick admits after a lone Democratic community-college student sitting in back brings up the war. “But it’s inappropriate to have those debates until our troops are out of harm’s way. I would not take up the Congress’s time right now debating those things. I can learn about them later.”

In a post from later in the day, he also finds that the Seattle Times reported in mid-August McG's more Bush-ist stance:

McGavick repeated his contention that the issues around the invasion should not be debated until the war is over and all U.S. troops are back.

This contest was looking troublesome for Cantwell earlier in the summer, but she had started to pull ahead (which is also due to her mea culpa on support for the Iraq War, which has gone a long way to appeasing the anti-war Seattle crowd) even before McG's candor came into question. It's still early days (heck, the primary still hasn't been officially voted on), but I'm feeling a bit more comfortable about keeping this seat.

[ posted with ecto |  ]