Pre-Debate Shenanigans

Despite their focus on prepping their candidates for their first face-to-face debate, the campaigns of Linda McMahon and Chris Murphy still found plenty of time for sniping.

Each campaign issued press releases branding the other as desperate and struggling. “Heading Into the Debate, Another Disastrous Week for McMahon,” screams the headline on a Murphy email blast. The press release goes on to recap a week’s worth of news that it says reflects unfavorably on McMahon.

Meanwhile, Team McMahon is circulating a blog post by Kevin Rennie that provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a story that was never written. The piece includes what Rennie says is an email from Huffington Post senior political writer and Politics Managing Editor Amanda Terkel  explaining that she won’t be writing a story about Murphy’s charge that McMahon plagiarized sections of her jobs plan.

The Murphy campaign alledged that whole sections of McMahon’s economic proposal, the centerpiece of her campaign, were lifted from other sources.

 ”We knew Linda McMahon’s so-called jobs plan was a regurgitation of failed right-wing Republican economic policies, but we assumed she had chewed them over a bit before spitting them back out and calling them her own,” Murphy spokesman Eli Zupnick said in an email.

 But the Huff Post passed on the story — as did other media — after concluding that the McMahon campaign properly footnoted and credit the sources in the print version of the plan. (It is worth noting that the online version of the plan  initially lacked the proper citations; they were added later.)

With today’s sparring as a backdrop, tomorrow’s debate  should be really interesting.