Attacks on Kirk Come Up Short

The media has been trying to discredit Mark Kirk's record. Instead, they should focus on the substance of the election.

Ever since the story on Richard Blumenthal's embellished military record broke, there has been a mad dash to replicate the scoop. And in an election year featuring numerous races that are not only open but wide open, who could blame reporters (and opposition researchers) for trying? They should get while the getting is good.

But the media's sequel to the Blumenthal story is playing less like "The Godfather: Part II," and more like "Speed 2: Cruise Control." That is, it’s a cheaper, more desperate version that tries to recapture the magic of the first. The media's new campaigning pinata? The Illinois Republican Senate candidate, Mark Kirk.

Kirk has established himself as an authority on numerous issues, from missile defense to national security to fiscal policy.  But impugning someone's wonkdom is no fun, doesn't generate headlines, and is an attack Kirk's challenger, Alexi Giannoulias, likely couldn't make.  So, instead, Giannoulias has tried to expose Kirk as a dishonest, opportunistic pol.  Giannoulias's first attempt, in true Linda McMahon, WWE brawling fashion, was to question Kirk's 21-year military record.  Most of the kerfuffle was over Kirk having embellished a military award that his unit had received in 1999, following his service as a Naval Reservist in Kosovo.  Though Kirk played an active role in leading the unit, the award was not bestowed on Kirk himself, but on his unit as a whole.  Kirk has apologized for the misstatement and corrected it on his website.

Today, in a story headlined, "In Illinois Race, a Teaching Career is Questioned," the New York Times implies that Kirk somehow lied about his career as a teacher. Kirk taught at a nursery while a senior at Cornell and at a college preparatory school in England following his time as a student at the London School of Economics, yet he is under fire for having made two innocuous, and perhaps slightly exaggerated, comments on his experience as a educator. That's it. He didn't embellish or misstate any part of his teaching record. If he had, it would have led the article.

What the latest New York Times article reveals is not that Kirk is a lying scoundrel, but that this race, up to this point, has been devoid of ideas and intellectual debate. Kirk would likely be game for such a race; he routinely debated the merits and drawbacks of the Iraq war with Dan Seals, his Democratic challenger in 2006 and 2008 for the 10th District seat. But the problem is that Giannoulias has little to debate: his record as State Treasurer, only four years old, is thin; he hasn't won the endorsement of the Obama White House, so it's unlikely he will be actively engaging with Kirk on the administration's policies; and the one achievement he has hung his hat on -- being a manager of the Broadway Bank -- has become, to use banker terms, a liability, not an asset.  (The Broadway Bank has been closed by the FDIC for its faulty loans, and, while it was solvent, it made loans to certain unseemly figures.)

So, where to go from here? Kirk's campaign, through its ongoing mentioning of Giannoulias' private sector record, has already established the Democrat as a questionable figure. Now, to win, Kirk needs to make this campaign about the issues, and he needs to force Giannoulias to defend a President whose endorsement he hasn't even won.  I'd watch that issues-centered discussion over "Speed 2" any day of the week.