Watching recent commercials, one would be forgiven their surprise to learn that Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) is apparently a great populist. If only our natural memories were as short as the Senator seems to hope, this strategy might hold water.
But to those living in New Hampshire, her ideological record is plainly known to be nothing more than the sanitized socialism advocated by her junior Democrat colleagues in the congress.
Hassan has ever been the advocate of increased tax and regulation in New Hampshire, making her recent populist guise all the more transparent. Indeed, the commercials her campaign has lately released espousing her opposition to the Biden agenda have timed well with what appears to be a serious effort to disinfect such other public materials as her Wikipedia page.
And that cleanup effort has not been minor.
In June 2022, the section of her Wikipedia entry entitled ‘Controversies’ was removed: a section that had previously detailed incidents in which one of Hassan’s congressional interns shouted “f**k you” at then-president Donald Trump, and worse, where Hassan staffers Jackson Cosko and Samantha Davis pleaded guilty to federal crimes for illegally accessing and disseminating the personal information of five Republican Senators, no longer occupies a prominent place in her biography.
In other recent instances of Wikipedia editing, her husband Thomas’ censure by the Association of Boarding Schools for failing to disclose the sexual misconduct of a former teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy was excised; meanwhile, her cross-party support for extending the so-called ‘Remain in Mexico Policy’ was prominently added to the Senator’s resume, in line with her newfound role as some born-again moderate. The relevant section headline on Wikipedia was recently changed from “Undocumented Immigration” to “Illegal Immigration” and finally to “Immigration,” in what is likely another superficial attempt at conservatizing her record.
Is this not the same woman who, during her tenure in the New Hampshire State Senate, did little but offer her vocal and legislative support to over thirty tax increases? Who was later described even by The Atlantic in 2014 as “[speaking] in the sort of scripted, too-boring-to-quote genericisms that drive reporters crazy?” Who, at least as of last September, voted with President Biden’s political agenda 100% of the time? Are we really to believe that such an unremarkable leftist has now formed strong party-bending opinions in support of the American taxpayer? Or is this newest performance by Sen. Hassan simply a bald attempt to limn a political kinship that she hasn’t earned?
Hassan’s populist pantomime is as ridiculous as it is irritating. Her late resistance to the Biden agenda springs only from electoral necessity and not from any longstanding policy positions. The well-known fact that even her gubernatorial campaigns were supported by over $11 million in outside spending from D.C. Democrat syndicates offers but only a fraction of the many reasons why New Hampshire voters know Maggie’s new brand to be a farce. Costly commercials only belie the ultimate falseness of her claim of populism and are an insult to those New Hampshire citizens who have personally seen the negative impact of her true political sympathies.
Senator Hassan is a leftist and ought to be known as one.
