Botched Blue Virginia/LuAnn Bennett Interview Flushed Down the Memory Hole
Last Friday, the left-wing site Blue Virginia published an exclusive interview with Tenth District candidate LuAnn Bennett, which curiously went missing minutes after its publication.
It wouldn’t re-emerge until yesterday when the site’s editor Lowell Feld re-published the interview, explaining that he was splitting it into three pieces – or so he claimed.
Bennett then promoted the interview in a Tweet to her followers.
Why wouldn’t she be proud? The interview was heavily edited to protect her from the terrible answers she gave last week, before her advisors presumably asked for its swift deletion.
Bearing Drift was fortunate to catch the original interview from last week and will lay out, in detail, how Bennett’s spin-heavy campaign benefited from yet another hasty cover-up designed to hide the true candidate from public view.
The details are embarrassing indeed. In the interview, Bennett looks forward to taxpayer-funded travel junkets, reinforces her out of district residency, belittles rural residents, and even guesses, “my mom would vote for Trump.”
The Case of the Disappearing Junkets
In the sanitized interview, Bennett speaks of impacting policy and helping people with the broadest of platitudes, offering little substance in response to a question asked by Feld, which read and still reads, “What about the potential for a member of Congress to impact policy and help people very broadly?”
Why was Bennett’s answer so short and vague?
Unlike what Feld now reports, Bennett originally answered this question by bragging about the taxpayer-funded travel junkets she took with her ex-husband, former Congressman Jim Moran.
Bennett’s advisors would have been understandably furious when they read her honest – if unpolished – answer about jetting all over the world at taxpayer expense.
The junket-loving jet setter originally said (deletions in bold):
Q. What about the potential for a member of Congress to impact policy and help people very broadly?
A. “[Jim Moran and I] traveled a lot” on Congressional delegations…those are not boondoggles, by the way, they are working trips…from the time they got up to a dinner late at night at the embassy. We traveled to the Middle East a lot, we traveled to Asia, and that was really eye-opening to me…those issues started to resonate with me as you read things about foreign policy and other countries and conflicts? once you’ve been there, it becomes much more relevant and you have a deeper understanding of what’s happening in the world and the United States’ role in the world.”
Ouch, how embarrassing. No wonder the original post was pulled down within minutes, sanitized, and not re-published until later. Could that answer be any more off-message and out-of-touch?
Most Congressional aspirants look forward to the bills they can write, not the trips they can take. In a word association test, they’d respond to “help” with “legislation” – not “free trip.”
Were all those trips properly reported? Virginians reeling from travel and gift controversies would love to know, particularly in light of the re-emergence of then-Governor Tim Kaine’s travel controversies since his nomination for Vice President.
The edited answer to Question #3 now omits any reference to LuAnn’s love of taxpayer-funded travel junkets. Instead, Feld covered up Bennett’s botched answer by substituting the second half of her response to Question #1.
That’s not honest journalism, but LuAnn Bennett is not an honest candidate.
Nobody in the Tenth Told her to Run for Office
Bennett’s answer to the second half of Question #3 is every bit as embarrassing as her love of taxpayer-funded junkets and the Congressional lifestyle. When asked who inspired her to run for office, Bennett named not a single person from the Tenth District.
The second half of her now-deleted answer originally read:
“About a year ago, Rep. Don Beyer called me, and he said LuAnn, would you consider running for the 10th district Congressional seat? I know you’ve lived there your whole life…you have a great life story…you’re from outside the system.” “I looked at my business to see whether I was truly at a point where I could step back and do something else, and that kind of worked out…I talked to Rep. Gerry Connolly, Sen. Mark Warner, Sen. Tim Kaine, just to ask their advice…Mark Warner said this is hard, so if you don’t have a burning desire to do this, don’t…I thought a lot about it, I know that Barbara Comstock would dig up things that don’t even exist…”
Why delete praise from leaders like those unless it reinforces Bennett’s status as a recruited outsider?
If LuAnn Bennett has deep ties to the Tenth District as she claims, then why does she not cite any of its residents as her inspiration to run? Why does she not mention seeking the counsel of or accepting encouragement from in-district Democratic leaders, such as Delegate Kathleen Murphy, Senator Jennifer Wexton, or any of the local supervisors, county leaders, or prominent Democratic activists?
The answer is what Bennett’s critics have said all along: she doesn’t have substantial ties to the district, and in fact, moved there to run for office at the urging of Democratic leaders who had to recruit someone after in-district leaders declined.
Her Residency, Don Beyer, and those Rural Bitter Clingers
In the next section, Feld edited his own question, changing the original, “Don Beyer said you have a strong personal story, can you tell us a bit about that?” to a more generic, “I’ve heard from a few people that you have a strong personal story, can you tell us a bit about that?”
Why was Don Beyer edited out? Was the name of a potential Senate contender not supposed to be used, or did LuAnn’s consultants worry that invoking Beyer’s name her strong ties to the Eighth District, rather than the Tenth?
While journalists should wince at that revision of a reported question, what follows in Bennett’s answer is even worse.
Bennett originally answered, and Feld originally reported (subsequent deletions in bold font):
“I grew up in the Midwest, and that’s relevant, because I grew up on a farm, and there’s always part of me that will be a country girl….I’ve never experienced that more than in this campaign, going out to the western part of the district…The rural areas in the district feel like home to me? there’s something about being out there that taps into that first 20 years of my life — the small towns. I know that most of them are conservative Republicans, but so is my family…My guess is my mom would vote for Trump…It ties into another reason why I’m doing this, that we have left behind such a big segment of our population, and I know, because they’re my relatives and their friends, and it’s where I grew up…they believe the sound bites from Fox News.”
After publication, Bennett’s political consultants probably weren’t too happy about her condescending tone and how it might be received by conservatives and by rural voters. Protecting Bennett, Feld made a few edits, releasing this statement on their second failed attempt at authenticity:
“I grew up in the Midwest, and that’s relevant, because I grew up on a farm, and there’s always part of me that will be a country girl. The rural areas of the 10th district feel like home to me; there’s something about campaigning there that taps into that first 20 years of my life — the small towns. I know that most of them are conservative, but so is my family … It ties into another reason why I’m doing this, that we have left behind such a big segment of our population, and I know, because they’re my relatives and their friends, and it’s where I grew up…they believe the sound bites from Fox News.”
The very first deletion reinforces a criticism which has haunted Bennett’s campaign all along; namely, her ties to the district are weak because she moved into the Tenth to run for Congress.
“I’ve never experienced that more than in this campaign, going out to the western part of the district,” said Bennett, in a now-deleted quote.
Of course she “never experienced [the district] more than in this campaign” – she moved into it to run for Congress. The Western reaches of the district are completely unlike the lifestyle she’d become accustomed to for decades in Arlington and Washington, hence her newfound campaign lifestyle bringing back memories and emotions she hadn’t felt since she grew up on a Midwestern farm more than four decades ago.
For her, traveling and campaigning in rural America is much like how one feels when opening up a long-neglected box from Mom’s attic and experiencing that moment when the memories of decades past come rushing back after so long stored away.
Why? She doesn’t live there. It’s brand new again to her Washingtonian mindset and lifestyle.
Others, though, will be troubled at what remains, where Bennett’s elitism is on full display.
To Bennett, those “left behind” Fox News watchin’, bible clingin’, gun totin’, voters from “the western part of the district” are just lost in the political wilderness – bless their hearts – without a Washington elitist like Bennett around to set them straight.
Bennett will deny it, but the rural conservatives she calls “left behind” know exactly what she meant – and they’re sick and tired of being belittled or spoken down to for holding an honest difference of political opinion from the self-appointed political intelligentsia.
Bennett Guesses Mom “Would Vote for Trump”
Just as bad, though, is another edit in the same section, in which, on the second pass, Feld deleted Bennett’s speculation that, “My guess is my mom would vote for Trump.”
On the campaign trail, Bennett makes no secret of her dislike for Trump; in fact, it’s about the only thing she says in public and to reporters. Her advisers have crafted for her a very negative campaign strategy, in which Bennett avoids discussing the issues or what she’d do in office. Instead, she focuses almost exclusively on tying her opponent to Trump, no matter how many times Comstock takes exception to his statements.
Bennett’s mom being a Trump supporter would throw a wrench into that narrative.
For a vulnerable, policy-challenged candidate, this strategy of running a near single-issue anti-Trump campaign and constantly vomiting up negativity in one of the nation’s most educated Congressional districts is liable to unravel if the first-time candidate speaks without her spokeswoman and is caught humanizing a Trump supporter – hence the need for Feld’s edit.
Is Bennett accusing her own mother of the same political and moral failings her and her staff routinely hurl at Trump’s supporters? As they say, those who live in glass houses…..
A Clinton-esque Deletion Spree
Of the nine paragraphs in the re-published interview, only one is the same as its original form.
Feld edited one question from its original version. Six were deleted entirely, although Feld claims he’s breaking up the full interview into three posts.
Of the paragraphs which survived deletion, four were moved in their entirety from one question to another.
In total, the re-published interview contains less than half the word count of the original, after the majority of the material was deleted. Feld claims the post is being split into three, but extensive doctoring of Bennett’s answers is well-documented.
In making these wholesale deletions, Blue Virginia has been more than “extremely careless” in handling exclusive material.
A Perfect Metaphor for Bennett’s Candidacy
This after-the-fact revision of a candidate’s answers validates the criticism of Bennett’s dishonesty, artificiality, specific-free policy proposals, and lack of connection to the district.
Voters have lost faith in these artificial campaigns where everything said was conceived by political consultants. What separates Bennett is her being caught as the edits are applied.
Scrubbing unfavorable information is nothing new for Bennett’s campaign. In May, Bearing Drift exposed the phony charity she trumpeted in her campaign biography and personal disclosure statement. Following the reporting, she scrubbed any mention of the defunct foundation from her campaign biography.
Bennett has attacked her opponent with false and exaggerated statistics. She played politics with the government’s response to the Zika Virus, uttering another false attack against her opponent.
Since the beginning, Bennett has been running a false and negative campaign, attempting to tie Comstock to Trump, while avoiding any mention of policy specifics or telling voters what she’d do were she in office.
The interview itself – including the deleted questions – is completely free of policy specifics.
Bennett never once discusses how she’d address the heroin crisis, support the unique needs of the district’s high-tech economy, or relieve congestion on local roads and transit.
Make no mistake, LuAnn Bennett is running a campaign of falsehoods built on a culture of cover-up, with the attack mailers and false TV commercials yet to come.
While Bennett sits on the phone all day dialing for dollars, Comstock is on the second week of her district work period, meeting with Metro leaders and demanding accountability, honoring our veterans, listening to entrepreneurs, inspiring young women, and meeting with first responders.
That’s a clear lesson in political contrast.
Stay tuned to Bearing Drift for more, where the rest of Bennett’s interview with Blue Virginia will be published should Bennett’s spin doctors obtain more revisions, additions, or wholesale deletions.
