Time to get the hook?

It may be time for Kelly Ayotte to get a new spokesman.

Last week we dinged Ayotte’s campaign manager Brooks Kochvar for attempting to convince the Union Leader’s John DiStaso that a National Republican Senatorial Committee fundraiser in DC for Ayotte wasn’t really being hosted by the NRSC.

This week it’s Kevin Landrigan’s column in the Nashua Telegraph where Kochvar is selling something we don’t quite understand.

Having taken heat from state Democrats (and GraniteGrok) for claiming the stimulus act is bankrupting our economy after paradoxically having used stimulus cash to fund a cold case program at the Department of Justice and encouraging eager government entities throughout the state to feed at the trough, Team Ayotte appears to abdicate the GOP frontrunner’s chief qualification for high public office. In this Sunday’s Nashua Telegraph, Kevin Landrigan noted he spoke with Kochvar, who explains it like this:

“She was attorney general and responsible for administering tens of millions of dollars in federal grants,’’ Kochvar said. “She can’t be held responsible for all those choices that are made, because they aren’t hers."

Leave aside for the moment the fact that in the above statement, Kochvar is saying Ayotte was both responsible and not responsible for those federal grants.

The only thing that legitimizes Ayotte’s candidacy is her tenure as attorney general. She can either embrace that or reject it, but she cannot do both.

It would be dishonest for Ayotte to claim credit for putting a cop killer on death row on the one hand while disavowing any responsibility for less popular actions by the Department of Justice on the other.

Ayotte announced her resignation as AG on July 7. We are now at the end of August. Ayotte has received high-level endorsements from national Republican figures and a fundraising commitment from the national party. And yet we still have no clear understanding of the justification behind her candidacy. We thought it was her record as AG, but her campaign manager has just taken that out of the equation.