A new Democratic meme: “Tea Partiers support raising the minimum wage”

The New Neo Posted on by

This article about Chuck Schumer’s plans to undermine the Tea Party is mostly a big yawn:

“The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite, plutocrats like the Koch Brothers want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants,” [Schumer] will say.

Schumer will argue Democrats must defend popular government programs, such as extended unemployment benefits and student loan subsidies, to persuade Tea Party voters they could benefit from federal programs.

“The average Tea Party member, like the average American, likes government run Medicare, likes government built highways and water and sewer lines, likes government support for education, both higher and lower,” he will say.

Yada yada yada.

First there was the “Tea Party is racist” lie. Then the IRS attack on the Tea Party. Now the “we’re your buddies and we have your best interest at heart; the Koch Brothers are not and don’t” approach from Schumer, who could promise most Tea Partiers the moon and they wouldn’t care.

This is what caught my eye from the article:

Democratic pollsters say a majority of Tea Party voters support increasing the minimum wage, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will address later this year.

“What the senator is getting at is, they’re very populist, and they are hard-pressed economically,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said of Tea Party voters. “So I think there is an interesting point right now where Democrats can lay out an economic agenda that really pressures the Tea Party leaders.”

Lake said Schumer and other Democratic leaders would be hard pressed to convince Tea Party voters to embrace big government, but they could push a populist economic agenda that resonates with them.

“A majority of Tea Partiers do support raising the minimum wage. They like to stand up for the little guy,” she said.

That would certainly surprise me, although I suppose anything’s possible. But I wondered what this was based on; the article didn’t say.

What I found when I researched it was that “Tea Partiers support raising the minimum wage” is a popular new Democratic meme, seemingly without much foundation. It appears to have started a few weeks ago on—where else?—MSNBC:

…[F]ormer congressman and frequent MSNBC contributor Harold Ford stated, “Chuck Todd said the majority of Tea Party members support an increase in the minimum wage.”…

…Margaret Carlson makes the statement that there are a “majority of Tea Party Activists who are for an increase in the minimum wage.”

In the case of both statements, Ford’s and Carlson’s, no survey or formal data was referenced. Efforts to contact Ford, Carlson, and Chuck Todd for verification or validation of these claims have met with no response…

In fact, TheBlaze did find one minimum wage survey that mentions the opinions of Tea Party members. The polling, done by the Public Religion Research Institute in November of 2013, found that 57% of Tea Partiers opposed raising the minimum wage.

And here’s a Pew poll from August of 2013 that also supports the idea that Tea Partiers do not favor raising the minimum wage:

Tea Party Republicans (32% favor) are far less likely than those who do not agree with the Tea Party (60%) to support raising the minimum wage.

According to the same poll, 50% of Republicans overall favor raising the minimum wage, while 47% oppose. Who are those Republicans who favor it? The less well-educated, and those with lower incomes. Perhaps Schumer is confusing “less-well-educated” and “lower income” with “Tea Party members.”

Then again, perhaps he’s just making s*** up.

Impatience: Virginia AG Mark Herring refuses to defend the state’s gay marriage ban

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Herring, Virginia’s newly-elected AG in a photo-finish race that featured a recount, will be joining the plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging the state’s ban on gay marriage. So not only is he declining to defend the state’s gay marriage ban, which was passed with 57% of the vote in 2006, but he is fighting to strike it down as unconstitutional.

You may recall my position on gay marriage: I believe bans are constitutional, and that the decision to allow gay marriage or ban it should be up to each state. So in a situation such as Virginia’s, it seems that if the people of Virginia wish to repeal the ban, the proper remedy would be to repeal the ban. And if the judiciary of Virginia thinks it is correct to declare the ban unconstitutional in the meantime, the proper remedy is to do so.

But until the people of Virginia officially declare otherwise, the proper role of AG Mark Herring would be to defend the law of Virginia in court, and therefore to work on behalf of defending the ban on gay marriage. If he wanted to declare it unconstitutional, he should have tried to become a judge. At the very least, he should have campaigned on the fact that he would be fighting the state’s gay marriage ban in court.

Republicans in the state seem to agree with me, not surprisingly:

“It took Mark Herring less than a month to decide he doesn’t want to be Attorney General. The first job of Virginia’s Attorney General is to be the Commonwealth’s law firm, and to defend the duly passed laws of Commonwealth,” said Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins.

To be fair, according to this article, Herring seems to have “stressed marriage equality as part of his campaign last year.” The article neglects to tell us what he actually said about it. Was it something general about gay rights, or did he promise to join the lawsuit against the ban? Somehow I doubt the latter.

The only other information I could find about Herring’s gay marriage promises during his campaign is from this article by David Weigel in Slate. Weigel, no fan of the gay marriage ban, approves of Herring’s actions, so it is probably true when Weigel writes that:

Gay marriage played no role in [Herring’s] campaign; in fact, Herring voted against gay marriage when it came before the legislature.

Herring would also have us think he just changed his mind on this. But does anyone actually believe that? I can’t imagine that it’s true.

Weigel also mentions this poll taken last July, which shows support for same-sex marriage in Virginia standing at 50%, and the opposition to gay-marriage at 43%. If that poll represents reality, it certainly seems that Virginians may have been poised to (as Weigel points out) “wave in gay marriages.”

Okay, if they wished to do so. But if so, why wasn’t the amendment repealed? Apparently, the pro-gay marriage forces were too impatient to allow the process to work its way through in the way it should have, and too worried that it wouldn’t succeed:

State Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-30th) has introduced legislation [in late November, 2013] to start the ball rolling to repeal the state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman…

To repeal the 2006 amendment, legislation would have to pass the General Assembly two times with an intervening election, then would go on the ballot in the next succeeding general election. If it won first passage in the 2014 session, the measure would have to again pass the legislature in the 2016 session after the next state election, meaning the earliest the measure could go before voters would be November 2016.

Even gaining first passage in the General Assembly could be the longest of longshots, particularly in the House of Delegates. A companion bill to Ebbin’s has been introduced by Del. Joseph Morrissey (D-Richmond).

In the 2013 session, a similar measure by Del. Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) failed to make it out of a House subcommittee. There was no companion bill in the state Senate.

When the marriage amendment was approved by the General Assembly in 2006, it passed on votes of 73-22 in the House of Delegates and 29-11 in the state Senate, winning support from a bipartisan mix of legislators. The six members of the Arlington legislative delegation at the time all voted against it.

Weigel doesn’t go into this background of how repeal might have worked, given enough time and support. Nor does any other article I’ve read so far about Herring’s recent decision not to defend the gay-marriage ban, by the way. But Weigel refers to it obliquely in the following manner:

So Virginia’s one of those states that’s probably ready to wave in gay marriages [according to the poll that showed 50% approving], but can’t, because an older and more conservative electorate locked and bolted the door.

“Locked and bolted the door”? I guess that’s how we now describe the usual, time-honored, amendment process—the same process by which the law was passed in the first place. The door isn’t “bolted” forever. It’s just that the pro-gay marriage forces know they don’t quite have the legislative support to unbolt it yet, and they don’t think there’s any reason they should have to wait to muster it. They are hoping that liberal judges—with the help of Virginia’s new AG, rather than his opposition—will do it for them.

[NOTE: This is somewhat akin to the history of Proposition 187 in California. If you’re not familiar with it, please read.]

Why Wendy Davis’ lies might matter, according to Chris Cillizza of the WaPo

The New Neo Posted on by

Because they might end up hurting her chances in 2018, by which time the demographics in Texas could favor a Democrat:

By running now, Davis effectively reserves her place at ”” or close ”” to the front of the line in future statewide races. (This happens all the time in both parties; Ed Gillespie is running for Senate in Virginia this fall with at least one eye on running well and losing but being first in line for governor in 2017.)

Unless, of course, Davis is seen as running a sub-par candidacy. And that is where the danger in these résumé questions lies for Davis. If the campaign is dogged by stories about her bio and her star ”” which is ascendant at the moment ”” is viewed as tarnished in some real way, then her ability to reserve that place at the front of the line is far less certain. And, remember that both Julian and Joaquin Castro as well as a slew of other ambitious, young Texas Democrats are eyeing Senate race in 2018 and 2020 as well as the governor’s race in 2018.

What Davis then needs most of all is not to win ”” although that would be nice for her and her supporters ”” but rather to be seen as having run a creditable campaign that continues to elevate her star status. Allegations like these about her résumé, if they persist and/or lead to other problems with the campaign, are perilous to that perception.

Otherwise, no big whoop if a Democrat runs on a resume that he/she has misrepresented to an alarming degree.

And by the way, WaPo, the word allegations in that last sentence is incorrect. An allegation is “a claim or assertion that someone has done something illegal or wrong, typically one made without proof.” The corrections to Davis’ resume are facts, facts which she has not even denied once they were publicized. They are merely inconvenient truths.

More from the Wendy Davis campaign: Greg Abbott; what does he know of struggle?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post about Wendy Davis that got quite a bit of blogosphere attention and traffic. It contained the surprising (to me, anyway; most Texans already knew it) piece of information that Davis’s opponent Greg Abbott has been a paraplegic since a terrible accident in his mid-20s, and that despite this fact Davis was accusing him of a failure to understand struggle and hardship. She added, with no sense of irony, that her attackers hadn’t “walked a day in my shoes.”

It turns out these statement were hardly flukes. Today I found two more quotes of the same type, both issued on Monday. No, they don’t have the gaffe-like quality of “walked a day in my shoes.” But if anything they’re even worse in terms of substance.

The first is from Matt Angle, head of the Lone Star Project, an anti-Republican group that is self-described as “one of the most aggressive and effective political research and strategic communications organizations in Texas” [emphasis mine]:

The Abbott attacks are a malicious expression of fear. Greg Abbott knows that Wendy connects with and inspires Texans. The Abbott campaign to tear down Wendy and her family show an overall hostility to mothers who have to juggle work with getting an education with raising their kids. Moreover the attacks show that Abbott is profoundly out of touch with Texans who face challenges and meet them with a courage he just can’t muster…Wendy struggled through some tough times when she was younger, worked hard, fought hard and came out a success, with daughters who adore her. That’s a real and inspiring Texas story that terrifies Greg Abbott.

The second is from Davis herself, in an interview with a reporter from the San Antonio Express-News, the original of which is unfortunately behind a firewall:

In an interview, [Davis] called [Abbott] “completely out of touch with the reality of the struggles that a young woman like I faced.”

So this is a very focused and well-thought out campaign to (a) double down on Davis’ message of how much she has struggled, despite the discrepancy between her original narrative and the facts; and (b) accuse Abbott of insensitivity to people’s struggles, as well as cowardice and fear.

From what I’ve read about Greg Abbott (most of it in the last two days), he—unlike Davis—doesn’t seem to be one to get into a contest about who’s had more suffering in life. But I’ve done the research, and I’m writing about it.

And you know what? The fact that he became a paraplegic as a young man is only part of it:

Abbott said he has been driven by the notion that he wants to do the right thing, that time is precious and life can change in the blink of an eye.

That idea came to him long before his injury, when as a teenager [Greg was 16] his father died of a heart attack. A grandfather’s death also was sudden — in a car wreck, he said.

“I’ve seen that repeat — losing my dad in an instant, actually losing my granddad in an instant too … and what happened to me, obviously,” he said. “And so basically I have an oversimplified mantra and that is you never know when a tree’s going to fall on you. … What would you do differently if you knew that? And I know that.”

Abbott is straightforward about what he lost when his legs became paralyzed, saying the last photograph of him before his accident was from a dance he attended with Cecilia [his wife].

“The inability to ever dance with her again, or to see her eye to eye as she is standing, or to hold her … or to walk into a lake — you know how it’s fun when a dad and daughter get to walk into a lake together and curl your toes into the sand? Not happening,” he said. “The little things in life that matter the most — many of them are lost.”

Still, he said, his life “has been fuller and better after my accident. It’s hard for people to understand. But there’s a greater closeness to God and a greater closeness to family and I spend time with my daughter in ways that I may not have had I not encountered this situation,” he said.

He and Cecilia adopted their daughter, Audrey, after 16 years of marriage.

Cecilia said the father-daughter bond is tight. When their daughter was 5 or 6 and people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Cecilia said, “She would say I want to be a judge in a wheelchair.”

What a coward. A man who clearly “is profoundly out of touch with Texans who face challenges and meet them with a courage he just can’t muster.”

Davis’ supporter Matt Angle may have thought he was writing about Abbott, but he inadvertently described Davis and her entourage instead when he wrote that the “attacks are a malicious expression of fear.” Exactly. The attacks on Abbot are not just malicious and fearful: they are stupid and despicable.

Notes from Bakunin

The New Neo Posted on by

I studied Russia’s Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) in college and I must say he puzzled me; I never quite “got” him. He seemed to be a mass of contradictory impulses.

I’m not about to take (or give) a refresher course on Bakunin, nor am I endorsing him. But I’m highlighting him here because I came across a couple of quotes from him that show how well he seemed to understand that Communism (or Marxism, or Bolshevism, or whatever he would have called it at the time) would lead to the very biggest of Big Governments and tyranny.

Here’s one quote to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

And there’s this, longer but in a similar vein:

The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class”¦. But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all ”¦ but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars.

I especially like that “pretended” in the last sentence.

It’s kind of amusing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to observe someone like New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner struggle to retain his admiration for Barack Obama’s towering intellect and superb temperament as Chotiner simultaneously realizes that Obama is actually a supremely condescending blowhard who uses a great many more words than necessary to say absolutely nothing except how wonderful he is:

Yes, the president is capable of giving intelligent and mature answers to questions. But the intent is so obvious””and the effort shows such strain””that the answers feel more condescending than enlightening. Remnick’s [New Yorker] piece, in fact, doesn’t show Obama’s complexity; it shows Obama applauding his own complexity. The president is like a novelist who demands on telling you the motivation of every character, except he is the only character.

SCOTUS: public sector unions on trial

The New Neo Posted on by

This had gone under my radar till now. But it could be a big, big case:

William Messenger of the National Right to Work Committee asked the Supreme Court today to hold that public employee unions are unconstitutional.

“This is””I’m just going to use the word here, it is a radical argument. It would radically restructure the way workplaces across this country are””are run,” Justice Elena Kagan said from the bench. Since 1948, she pointed out, states have had the power to enact “right-to-work” laws that limit union power. Was Messenger arguing that “a right-to-work law is constitutionally compelled?”

Messenger didn’t back off. “In the public sector, yes,” he replied.

The NRTWC wants the Court to rule that “permitting the unions to collect fees for representing non-members””the so-called ‘agency fee’””violates the First Amendment.” This would be a decision that went against the precedent of at least the last 35 years, and Justice Scalia (of all people) seems to be the swing vote.

My reading of this—for what it’s worth, which is not all that much, since I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of the Court—is that there is a great reluctance to take such a huge step to reverse precedent, and that it is unlikely to happen. SCOTUSBLOG, one of the better reporters on such things, doesn’t seem to considers it all that likely either, but still a distinct possibility, at least according to the justices’ demeanors:

…[T]he atmospherics of Tuesday’s argument suggested strongly that this case has very large potential. The mood of the Court’s more liberal members was one of obvious trepidation, and that of its more conservative members ”” except for Justice Scalia ”” was of apparent eagerness to reach anew the core constitutionality of compulsory union support among public workers.

Ann Althouse reminds us of the way public unions actually work—at least according to Scott Walker, who has had a fair amount of experience fighting them in Wisconsin:

…[George Will wrote that] public sector unions are nothing more than “government organized as a special interest to lobby itself to expand itself.”

Collective bargaining gives the union bosses the keys to the statehouse, city hall, and school. It allows them to effectively sit on both sides of the bargaining table when contracts are negotiated, while no one represents the interests of the taxpayers (whose money is at stake) or the children (whose education hangs in the balance). It is cronyism, plain and simple.

It’s always risky to predict what the Supreme Court will do. But if the current Court takes a step as big as limiting public union power in this way on a national level, I will be surprised—and pleased.

Home movie

The New Neo Posted on by

This speaks for itself, I think. Just a bunch of Marxists in Mexico:

Have you ever noticed how people in old home movies never know quite what to do with themselves?

[NOTE: I said it spoke for itself, but in case you don’t know the background, take a look.]

Wendy Davis: “empowerment” and the poor little woman; “struggle” and the man

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a lot in the Wendy Davis story besides Davis and her constructed and false “narrative.” Here is one of Davis’ most recent official statements on the matter, a little masterpiece of accusing the accusers:

We’re not surprised by Greg Abbott’s [her Texas governorship opponent] campaign attacks on the personal story of my life as a single mother who worked hard to get ahead. But they won’t work, because my story is the story of millions of Texas women who know the strength it takes when you’re young, alone and a mother. I’ve always been open about my life not because my story is unique, but because it isn’t.

The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce. And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future and that’s what I’ve done. I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I’ve been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you that anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.”

Poor dear, being attacked by that big bad man who doesn’t understand the travails of single women everywhere! Like all Republicans.

That’s the ticket, as Annie’s List Executive Director Grace Garcia writes [Annie’s List is a group “dedicated to changing the face of power in Texas politics ”“ and thereby combating the assault on issues of most importance to women and their families ”“ by recruiting, training and supporting women candidates across the state”]:

We’re not surprised Republicans have attempted to undermine Wendy Davis’ campaign by calling her past into question ”“ we have seen similar attacks launched against women candidates before. The recent personal attacks on Wendy Davis and her family are blatant attempts to thwart her campaign and undermine her success…Greg Abbott is running scared and for good reason. Senator Davis’ personal story is a compelling narrative of perseverance and hard work that millions of Texans have responded to. It is appalling that Republicans would attack the details of that story rather than focus on the issues affecting Texas families.

Disputing the details of Wendy Davis’ life is especially offensive to the many Texas women who can relate to her story. In trying to tear down Senator Davis’ campaign and her personal story, Republicans are also tearing down all Texans who have overcome difficult circumstances. It’s clear Greg Abbott doesn’t understand Wendy Davis’ struggles and the struggles of millions of Texans, nor does he want to.

“Appalling” to question her story. She must not be questioned! To question her is to question the story of all downtrodden women. And Greg Abbott, Man (Republican Man, that is), does not understand or want to understand anything about the struggles of women. The irony that this is supposedly a feminist approach that will empower women only points out the blatant hypocrisy of Davis and her supporters, and way too much of feminism as well.

When I first wrote a draft of this post, the title was shorter, and it ended with the paragraph right above this. But before publishing, I decided to take a look at the history of Greg Abbott, about whom I knew practically nothing except that he was a man, a Republican, and white. I wondered whether there was any “narrative” of strife overcome that could be compared to Davis’s, of struggle against odds or difficulties, or if he’d had smooth sailing.

I didn’t expect to find much trouble in his background; perhaps a bit of financial difficulty while growing up, at the most. I was therefore surprised to discover the following:

Greg Abbott was elected attorney general in 2002. But his political trek began decades earlier – in agony.

At age 26, Abbott was partially paralyzed in a freak accident and bedridden for a month. His dream to practice law withered. But he tilled new ambitions, reading about politics during his recovery and internalizing a credo from his mother: Never say I can’t.

“That is one of the more guiding principals that got me through,” said Abbott, now 52. “Just because this happened doesn’t mean I can’t do whatever it is I wanted to do. It picked me up off of the hospital bed and got me going.”

The accident – an oak tree fell and struck his back as he jogged by – kept him hospitalized and in rehabilitation for more than three months. The recovery was often excruciating. He has used a wheelchair ever since.

It also hardened his resolve and propelled him on a path toward politics. He passed the bar exam a year after the accident, excelled as a Houston lawyer and eventually was elected a judge. Abbott, a Republican, has won two terms as attorney general and is running again against retired Houston lawyer Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Democrat.

He has used his tenure to combat child predators and human trafficking and to chime in on highly charged topics from climate change to health care.

Please read the whole thing.

This is the guy, remember, about whom Davis says:

I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I’ve been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you that anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.”

Since Abbott doesn’t walk at all, it’s a rather infelicitous figure of speech, don’t you think?

And then there’s Davis’s parrot Garcia, who writes:

In trying to tear down Senator Davis’ campaign and her personal story, Republicans are also tearing down all Texans who have overcome difficult circumstances. It’s clear Greg Abbott doesn’t understand Wendy Davis’ struggles and the struggles of millions of Texans, nor does he want to.

It turns out that “hypocrites” is way too mild a word to describe Davis and Garcia.

How many euphemisms can you think of for the word “lie”?

The New Neo Posted on by

However many you can think of, the MSM can probably think of more—if they’re talking about the lies of a Democrat.

When it first emerged that Obama’s “if you like your [fill in the blank] you can keep your [fill in the blank]” Obamacare promises were exactly that—boldfaced lies—it was almost amusing in a sick, bitter, tragic way to listen to the excuses made by not only Obama, his aides, and his supporters, but pundits of the liberal/left persuasion.

I really can’t remember them all, but they were exceptionally creative and varied. The first was that he didn’t really say that, he said something else. They had to revise that one fairly quickly, because they’d somehow forgotten the existence of videotape, which proved their revisionism was merely a new lie. Another was that he wasn’t lying because he didn’t know what the effects of his own policies would be. Or, he wasn’t lying because it really only hurt such a small percentage of people (which was itself a lie, because it’s not as though all the people it will ultimately hurt are yet known). He wasn’t lying because Obamacare has good intentions and the people with the canceled policies had “junk” policies anyway. He wasn’t lying because that was the only way he could get Obamacare passed.

Many of the excuses for Obama’s lies came more under the heading of rephrasing—or, as they say in the therapy biz, “reframing.” He wasn’t lying, he just wasn’t accurate enough or thorough enough. Or he “misspoke” (love that nearly-meaningless word, which is only really appropriate when someone has a slip of the tongue). The plans weren’t cancelled, they were “transitioned.” And on and on and on.

Now we have another case of a favored Democrat flat-out lying through her teeth, although she’s not running for national office. The culprit is Wendy Davis, the telegenic Texas state senator now running for Texas governor, who gained nationwide fame when she filibustered against a Texas abortion restriction. She has a compelling life story involving early marriage and single motherhood and divorce, financial struggle, and proud graduation from Harvard Law School via student loans and bootstraps—oh, and a little bitty part she left out, involving a supportive second husband who took care of the kids while she was away, and who ended up cashing in his 401K in order to help finance her education (last two years in college and her entire time at law school). They stayed together for ten years after her law school graduation, but she then moved out (allegedly cheating on him, although the divorce was not granted on those grounds), and he got custody of the children in the divorce, which occurred right after he had finished paying off those school loans for her.

Davis describes it all this way:

My language should be tighter,” she said. “I’m learning about using broader, looser language. I need to be more focused on the detail.”

Sometimes errors are about language. But this is most definitely not one of those times. This doesn’t turn on a word or two; this is a false narrative. Plus, Davis is a Harvard-educated lawyer. Accuracy of language is one thing she already knew a great deal about.

But even the language of the headline of the story where these facts emerged reported the story in a gentle way: “Key Facts Blurred.” No, the key facts were not “blurred,” they were omitted. They were covered up, hidden. And no, this wasn’t a “gaffe,” as WaPo columnist Nia-Malika Henderson’s column calls it in its headline. This was no inadvertent error, no etiquette slip.

Davis made other misstatements, such as saying she was a bit younger than she actually was when she got her first divorce, or lengthening the amount of time she actually lived in a trailer. These are the garden-variety lies typical of a politician, and although not laudable, they’re not all that important. If that was all she lied about, I wouldn’t be writing this post about her. But her leaving out her second husband’s role in her rags-to-riches story is what one might call a material lie, and a large one at that.

It also was a gratuitous lie. Her story was good enough before that, and involved a certain amount of hardship overcome. Why did she bother to lie? I submit that public tolerance for lies (from Democrats, anyway) has become greater during the last couple of decades and most especially over the Obama years. It probably has not escaped her notice that the penalty is vanishingly small, the benefits potentially large, and that the best defense if caught is reframing, minimization, and counter-attack.