Congressman and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DSCC) Chair Sean Patrick Maloney pushed back hard at CNN’s Jake Tapper over the oft-levied charge that he “boosted” a MAGA lunatic in a Republican primary.

On Wednesday night’s edition of CNN Tonight with Jake Tapper, the anchor and the chair tussled over the notion that Democrats have spent millions of dollars to “boost” fringe MAGA candidates in primaries in order to select weaker general election opponents for their own nominees.

In Maloney’s case, he’s getting guff for running this ad:

Rep. Maloney (no, the other one) offered one of the few defenses Democrats even offer to the charge, and undoubtedly the best one. Most national Democrats, including the White House, punt when asked about the practice, insisting it’s not their place to tell anyone else how to run their race — which is also fine, but not when there’s absolutely zero prominent active defenders from this talking point.

And to be fair, some of the attacks are coming from inside the house, from Democrats fretting in the press. But the talking point has been swallowed whole by the entire mainstream media.

It is an admittedly hard-to-resist premise that Tapper summed up well when he asked Maloney — minutes after President Joe Biden delivered a blistering speech on the threat to democracy that MAGA Republicans present, with the bone-chilling attack on the Pelosis as exhibit A — this:

By amplifying these election-denying deniers. Aren’t you holding responsibility, to a degree, for the undermining of democracy that you’re also warning about?

What followed was a sight as rare as a unicorn riding a leprechaun through a Mensa Members for Trump meeting — a Democrat who isn’t President Biden actually fighting back. Here’s a taste:

REP. MALONEY: Oh, my God! Jake, let’s, let’s be really clear. What that question you just played was about, was who’s questioning the outcome of elections? And that started with Donald Trump. And we all know it. And let’s be clear, that $53 million, it’s $400,000 at the DCCC in one race, one. Where we ran a true general election ad two weeks early, calling John Gibbs an extremist who too conservative for western Michigan.

JAKE TAPPER: Yeah, to boost him!

REP. MALONEY: Hillary Scholten, who’s a great candidate, excuse me, is going to beat him like a drum. So if you want to ask the people who spent all that other money, that’s great. And let’s be clear, not one dime was spent from the DCCC supporting any Republican. It was spent criticizing a Republican for being too extreme. And it is going to result in a pro-choice, strong candidate named Hillary Scholten winning that race.

JAKE TAPPER: Come on. You guys were boosting John Gibbs, an election denier, a MAGA Republican, so that he would beat Congressman Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the Capitol attacks. You thought Gibbs would be easier for your Democratic candidate to beat, so you boosted him. That’s the only reason he won that race.

REP. MALONEY: Well, you’re using that word boost to be kind of cute. And other people say we’re kind of funding their campaigns. It’s ridiculous. We’re attacking them. But we are absolutely right. We thought he was an easier candidate and he has proven to be. Because he’s a nut and he’s too conservative for western Michigan. And Hillary Scholten is getting ready to beat him. And that is my focus, is making sure we bring, you know, common sense Democrats to Congress who are going to move our country forward. And let’s be clear again, $400,000 out of a $340 million budget. So if you want to warm up these leftovers, we can keep going. But right now we’ve got, we’ve got five or six days until we have an election. And that’s that’s where my focus is. And we’re going to win that seat in Michigan 3.

There’s a lot wrong with the argument that’s been made against Democrats in this regard — and I will get to all of that — but the wrongest is the assertion that these ads were “boosting” these candidates. It has been repeated as fact by hard news anchors and reporters, but it is an opinion. At best it is shorthand that attempts to divine the motives of Democrats running these ads, but it is in fact misleading and false in every respect.

As Maloney pointed out, the ad he ran was an attack ad. To accuse Democrats of “boosting” is to strongly suggest these ads were in praise of these candidates. In almost every case they were not, and in the case of John Gibbs — well, if the DCCC is “boosting” the MAGA supporter, then so is a guy named Jake Tapper:

The DCCC drew a scolding from Tapper when they used that segment in a tweet, but cut out the part where Tapper mentioned the DCCC. But they also cut out most of the three solid minutes Tapper and Andrew Kaczynski spent detailing some of the Trump acolyte’s extremist conservative statements. Surely any voter who would see the DCCC’s ad as a “boost” of Gibbs would view that segment similarly. They do get CNN in Michigan.

In fact, CNN has mentioned Gibbs 48 times since July, each time describing his ties to Trump, which is what we in the biz call “earned media” that I’m guessing far outstrips the $400k that Maloney spent for the ad.

Way back in July, CNN was all over Gibbs, with political correspondent Manu Raju going out to Michigan to catch Gibbs on camera denying the election results in a segment that Tapper introduced by slamming the MAGA nutjob Democrats:

So these ads were not “boosting” MAGA lunatics, they were attack ads. The only difference between the DCCC and CNN is — arguably — the intent.

But even here, the premise fails at every level. Let’s take them one at a time.

Was the intent to “boost” these candidates through sophistry — attracting votes by making attacks that would be attractive to Republican primary voters, helping them win against “moderates” like Rep. Peter Meijer?

That’s the crux of the factual argument, if not the moral one, but this premise fails the intent test on two fronts. First of all, if Democrats are pointing out things that their own critics cite as legitimate attacks against Gibbs, for example (calling him a “nut” is fairly dispositive), then they can hardly be blamed for the fact that so many Republicans find those things attractive — in fact, that’s the entire point.

Which leads to the second point on the intent of the ads, which is not to boost these candidates, but to defeat them. As Mediaite’s own Colby Hall noted in August, these candidates “Are on Track to Get Smoked in General” elections. A critic with an axe to grind could argue there’s a sense in which “boosting” is a defensible description, but not an objective one. Yet it has been widely adopted by ostensible objective news personalities.

In Tapper’s case, this appears to have been done out of reverence for Meijer’s so-called “courage” in doing what should be the bare minimum, which he makes plain even in this exchange. He is not alone. But Maloney dispatched with that nonsense as well.

“When people like you say, where are all the good Republicans? You helped defeat one of them,” Tapper told him, and where other Democrats might have shrunk, Maloney challenged the facially absurd premise. If Maloney did anything to help his own candidate, he’d be “helping to defeat” Meijer.

But Maloney also listed the ways in which Meijer and other “good Republicans” who “are going to vote for Kevin McCarthy and put Jim Jordan at the head of the Judiciary Committee where they’re going to take away your reproductive freedom, pass a national ban on abortion, give you two years of Hunter Biden and nothing else” are worthy of defeat. The real list is even longer.

It includes something Maloney touched on: even if these so-called “good” Republicans don’t support all of that — and they definitely do — they’ll still help form a majority that will support each and every thing Trump wants them to.

A lot of media figures are susceptible to the hero narrative around people like Meijer or former Vice President Mike Pence, and so this is a popular bit of framing. That doesn’t make it any less stupid.

There’s also a nakedly unfounded assertion of fact that these people use: that these ads made any difference at all. Meijer lost to Gibbs in the primary by a significant margin, 3.5 percent. It was not a close call. Meijer’s vote share was less than two points off of his 2020 primary win, when he faced multiple challengers.

And before the ads, Hillary Scholten was beating both Meijer and Gibbs — although she had a much bigger lead on Gibbs.

But way back in February, another poll showed Meijer with sky-high negatives — and a Grand Canyon-sized opening for Gibbs. From Politico:

In the poll, the incumbent leads an initial primary matchup with Gibbs, 26 percent to 13 percent. But the mid-January survey of 400 likely Republican voters showed 50 percent of Republican voters view Meijer unfavorably, versus 34 percent who have a positive view of him. Fully 62 percent said they would back another GOP candidate over Meijer.

The poll, conducted by Impact Research, also tested how the primary might change after voters learned that Meijer had voted to impeach Trump and that Trump had backed Gibbs. Gibbs jumped into an 18-point lead in that scenario, boosted by Trump’s high numbers among Republicans.

So unless the idea is that Gibbs was going to hide his ties to Trump and CNN was never going to mention that Meijer was up against a Trump nut and Republican voters in Michigan were not going to otherwise find out that Gibbs is a Trump nut, there is very little evidence to even hint that the DCCC “helped to defeat” Meijer, let alone to state this as fact.

Perhaps worse than the “boosting” charge — or at least just as bad — is the other phrase that media types have adopted to describe this false talking point: “meddling.”

Here’s a little montage to illustrate the problem with that term (these are only CNN clips because the other cable networks have less tenuous claims to objectivity, but they all did this):

Did you see that last one? That was Charlie Crist talking to Jim Acosta about the actual election meddling that is one more reason to vote out even the “good” Republicans who have refused to support the election reform bill that bears the name of late Civil Rights hero Rep. John Lewis, as opposed to the legitimate activities of the Democratic Party that the media has tried to help equate with truly sinister voter suppression efforts.

That might be the most nauseating part of this, that the entire reason this false accusation — boosting, meddling, whatever you call it — is to create a false equivalence between Democrats acting legitimately and MAGAts trying to destroy Democracy, and the result is to provide cover for them.

None of this is to say these were necessarily good ideas. If I had the time or the inclination, I could probably find a hundred CNN segments talking about how little effect any political ad has on the outcome of any election. Just as it’s a tall order to prove these particular ads affected these particular races, it would be a tall order to convince me that the money spent in this effort could not have been spent better elsewhere. In Maloney’s case, at least the expenditure was small.

I’m glad to see Maloney fighting back, but it would do other Democrats well to follow suit and burn this talking point with fire, not because the ads themselves were worthy, but because the despicable inference — that Democrats somehow have undercut their standing against supporters of an openly-racist insurrectionist former president because they made a legitimate effort to defeat them — cannot be allowed to stand.

Watch above via CNN Tonight with Jake Tapper.

The post ‘Oh My God!’ Maloney Bristles at Charge He ‘Boosted’ MAGA Lunatic — Accuses Jake Tapper of Getting ‘Cute’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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