( - promoted by Jennifer Daler)
Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes are used to a hostile press environment. That goes with the territory in which her home town paper, the largest by far in the state, has fed New Hampshire a sour bile for so many years. But the Union Leader has reached new depths today.
In yesterday's New York Times, Jeff Zeleny did a confused piece of reporting in which he filled on the arbitrary theme that Democrats were afraid to hold town halls and were instructed by their leadership to avoid them. You know... they're afraid of the finger waggers from last August. Anyway, he pointed out that several members of congress from around the country were not holding town halls last weekend. This, of course, is a story he could have written after most any weekend in the year, when Congress is on break or not.
He's a respected political reporter but seemed not to understand the difference between a non-campaign town hall meeting and a campaign event. He used Carol as one example of this theme and in a couple of short paragraphs even managed to get his facts wrong, asserting that she harassed Jeb Bradley at his town meetings after she had announced her run for Congress. That's a great example of how myth-making by the opposition takes root in the conventional wisdom and get recycled into a perceived reality.
As everyone knows, Carol has done a zillion town halls - 11 this year.
So yesterday's half-baked NYT story gives the Union Leader a hook for one of the most cynical slash and burn editorials I think I've seen, manufacturing umbrage over the fact that Carol and Paul Hodes held no town hall meetings last weekend. The punch line: "People of New Hampshire, this is a bloody outrage."
Unlike the New York Times, the Union Leader knows well the record of Carol and Paul in communicating with their constituents. So there's no explanation for this editorial other than as an effort to deploy cynical fabrications in a campaign against Carol and Paul.
As usual, this is not gonna be a fair fight, folks. Get ready!
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