You’re 23. You go to a party. You drink a little. Some not so flattering pictures are taken of you horsing around with your friends. Five years later you decide to run for Congress. Those pictures end up on the internet, on a regional blog written by supporters of your opponent, which gets picked up by a larger blog that everyone reads. What’s the best way to ensure that the story stays small? Simple – you ignore it. Let your surrogates explain the pictures or, at most, make a joke about them in a speech.
What’s the best way to ensure that the story has legs? Well, first, do an interview with a local TV station. Then go on the Today Show.
That’s exactly what Krystal Ball, the Democratic candidate running against Congressman Rob Wittman in Virginia 1, is doing. And I’m willing to bet she’s doing it on purpose. Why? Because there’s no other reason why she’d give those interviews – they’re 100% contrary to what every good crisis management plan advises. No matter what she says in the interviews, she’s giving the TV stations and the blogs more fodder and more excuses to run the pictures.
If you haven’t seen the pictures, BVBL has them here.
Ball is, apparently, “angry” about the pictures coming out. They’re “outrageous” and “sexist.” Really? Nobody seemed to think it was outrageous and sexist when Scott Brown’s Cosmo spread was splayed across the papers in Massachusetts.
But that didn’t stop her from making a perfect pivot from these pictures into a pitch for her new radio ads and her calls for Wittman to debate her. She’s pulling a textbook Briar Patch move – good enough that I wouldn’t be that surprised if she had leaked them herself. Given how fast and loose she’s played with the law when it comes to her business dealings, as Virginia Virtucon exposed months ago, I wouldn’t put anything past her.
Some of the commenters over on Not Larry Sabato are apoplectic about Ben’s willingness to put this story up. I think they should be thanking him – her campaign was on its last legs and the only question anyone had about the outcome in that race was how high into the double digits Wittman’s lead would go. Now she’s got national media attention. It could only be a matter of time, as one commenter on NLS said, before she’s up on TV telling everyone “I’m not a Christmas Dominatrix….I’m you.“
