Meet Robin Partello. And who is she? Well, she was someone who was featured as a Republican offering praise for Annie Kuster in a recent campaign ad for New Hampshire’s Second District. Just one, small, teeny-tiny problem:

That sounded a bit odd, so I called myself to confirm that. And it’s true: Ms. Partello is not actually currently a Republican*. Despite the fact that the camera zoomed in for a closeup so that they could dramatically show Ms. Partello saying “I’m a Republican.” Seriously, you have to ask yourself: why didn’t the Kuster campaign do this oppo first? …Because of course the VRWC is going to do this oppo. There is absolutely no reason why we wouldn’t do this oppo. It’s Oppo 101. You check the people who are telling a story, just in case there’s a problem with their story.

Ach, well. Maybe we now know why Annie Kuster’s polling took an abrupt nose dive, huh? Bad planning catching up to her, perhaps?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: For the record: the problem here is not Ms. Partello. It’s that Rep. Kuster is so hard up for cross-party appeal that she’s apparently willing to cut all the corners in the world to get the sound bites that she feels she needs.

*As you might imagine, historical data of this sort is not exactly freely available, and I was careful to make it clear that I was not trying to social-engineer the Clerk’s Office to give me information that was not freely available via the public record. Given Ms. Partello’s military service record, this post is enough of a potential minefield as it is.