By David Ferguson
Thursday, August 23, 2012 9:11 EDT
Wednesday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow talked about the problems that politicians run into when they try to run from their record rather than running on their record. Oftentimes this results in situations where candidates are left blinking and staring like stunned bunnies in the headlights of an onrushing car when an interviewer asks them a question regarding something they don’t want to talk about.
Maddow began the segment, entitled “A Child’s Treasury of Politicians Refusing to Answer Very Simple Questions,” with Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), a conservative congressman who flirted with “birtherism” at a fund-raiser in his home district. Coffman issued an official apology, but when a local NBC reporter tried to get him to discuss the remarks on camera, Coffman would only repeat the same phrase over and over robotically, “I stand by my statement that I misspoke and I apologize.”
Former Republican congressional candidate Jesse Kelley (R-AZ) adopted the same tactic with an ABC reporter around the same time, eliciting guffaws of amazement from bystanders. And just this week, Ohio Republican congressional candidate Josh Mandel took the same approach with a Dayton, Ohio ABC reporter when answering questions about his race against Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
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