Kelly Ayotte: The Invisible Senator at the Benghazi event

“We owe it to the Amer­i­can peo­ple to make sure that we under­stand: Exactly what hap­pened, What went wrong, Why couldn’t the great­est mil­i­tary in the world respond when an attack occurred almost over a seven hour period, and why were there at the min­i­mum, mis­state­ments made and cer­tainly mis­im­pres­sions given to the Amer­i­can peo­ple about the nature of this attack in the imme­di­ate expla­na­tions pro­vided by the admin­is­tra­tion in two weeks fol­low­ing the attack.” Sen Kelly Ayotte (R-​NH) 11−14−12

There is a lot of talk today about Beng­hazi after the press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day con­cern­ing Susan Rice, and the administration’s actions of Sep­tem­ber 11^th of this year.

On Morn­ing Joe, on CSPAN they high­lighted Sen­a­tors Lind­sey Gra­ham and John McCain and the ques­tions con­cern­ing Beng­hazi. Dur­ing their seg­ment with Angus King the sen­a­tor elect from Maine they asked about Sen­a­tor McCain and Graham.

There were how­ever three sen­a­tors at that press conference.

Sen­a­tor Kelly Ayotte (R-​NH) was also there and spoke to this issue, (as she had dur­ing the cam­paign). She gave a strong state­ment on the sit­u­a­tion and answered ques­tions as well.

You would think it’s kind of hard to ignore Kelly Ayotte at that event, She is tall (she tow­ered over both Sen­a­tors McCain & Gra­ham) but she is a younger, pho­to­genic woman who had a strong inter­est in this mat­ter. I’d think that would be some­thing to play up instead of just “two old white guys”.

I sug­gest that is exactly WHY she is left out.

It’s all a ques­tion of neg­a­tive mar­ket­ing. You can’t ignore John McCain, he is a for­mer Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and a war hero, but you can dis­miss him, Lind­sey Gra­ham has been con­sid­ered a pro­tégé of Sen McCain for a long time, if you want to pooh pooh McCain it’s fairly easy to do the same to Gra­ham. He was a mem­ber of the impeach­ment crew vs Bill Clin­ton and is just another south­ern white guy.

But Kelly Ayotte is a rel­a­tively young sen­a­tor, she is an up and com­ing mem­ber of the GOP and in fact the high­est rank­ing mem­ber of the GOP in office out of New Hamp­shire. I mean how many pho­to­genic north­east Repub­li­can women, backed by Sarah Palin, who are fear­less con­ser­v­a­tives in the Senate?

I sub­mit and sug­gest that a con­ser­v­a­tive woman who is a ris­ing star is exactly who the left and the media doesn’t want high­lighted and a real effort is going to made to con­tinue to down­play her and keep her unnoticed.

And of course if she is left out, then it is two old white guys beat­ing up on Susan Rice a woman of color, but if Kelly Ayotte is mak­ing points like this:

“Let’s also not for­get that, I think you all appre­ci­ate you don’t end up on every sin­gle major Sun­day show with­out affir­ma­tively putting your­self out there of want­ing to carry for­ward a mes­sage on behalf of the administration.

…that nar­ra­tive sim­ply doesn’t work.

Kelly Ayotte is going to be in the sen­ate till at least 2016, I sus­pect you are going to be see­ing a lot more of her on this issues and oth­ers. The MSM may want to play her down because she doesn’t fit their template.

I have no inten­tion of play­ing along.

Update: To see what I’m talk­ing about look at this story from Politico

Obama specif­i­cally rebutted Sen. John McCain (R-​Ariz.) and Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham (R-S.C.), who ear­lier Wednes­day called for a “Watergate-​style” inves­ti­ga­tion into the attacks and said they don’t trust Rice because of her state­ments on Beng­hazi. Rice is seen as a top con­tender to suc­ceed Hillary Clin­ton as sec­re­tary of state.

Kelly who? They quote the president:

“If Sen. McCain and Sen. Gra­ham and oth­ers want to go after some­body, they should go after me,”

Oth­ers? Oth­ers? There were only three peo­ple there. Sen Ayotte is “oth­ers”? Why not say “Sen­a­tor Ayotte”? Because that doesn’t fit the nar­ra­tive