Here’s a tricky way for candidates to bad-mouth their political opponents: Simply provide a platform for someone else to denigrate and lie about the other guy in the race. After all, the offensive language is not yours. It’s somebody else’s.
Val Demings, the Democrat hoping to replace Republican Marco Rubio in the Senate, has been sending out a series of David Hogg emails ripping into Rubio in what I would characterize as a very dishonest and underhanded way. Billing himself as a “gun safety advocate,” the young Parkland massacre survivor writes that:
“I’m working with Val Demings to defeat Marco Rubio because he’s taken over $3 MILLION from the gun lobby and voted against gun violence survivors like me every chance he gets. Florida deserves better than someone who’s such a coward.”
In the ongoing national debate over guns and gun violence, people of intelligence and goodwill can be found on each side of the argument. There is nothing cowardly about supporting Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. Nor is there anything cowardly about supporting serious restrictions on Americans’ access to lethal weapons.
Maybe David Hogg actually wrote the email. Or, more likely, Val Demings’ campaign people wrote it and gained Hogg’s permission to put his name on it.