Team Jeb adds Trump’s sister to the mix

Source: MSNBC (Maddow)

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel reports today, for example, on Team Jeb tackling a story about, of all things, Donald Trump’s sister.

It started with a Bloomberg Politics interview in which Mark Halperin asked about the Supreme Court and brought up the fact that Trump’s sister is an appeals-court judge. The candidate sang his sister’s praises, but said he’d rule her out for a high court nomination. Weigel picks it up from there:

Trump’s quote ran on Aug. 26. One day later, National Review columnist Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out that Maryanne Trump Barry was reliably pro-choice, and once rejected a lawsuit to stop partial birth abortions for “semantic machinations” about when life began. Just 20 minutes after that article went up, Bush’s spokesman and campaign manager tweeted it out, sexing it up a bit to say that Trump actually wanted to put his sister on the bench.

Jeb’s campaign manager actually pushed the story twice, “paging all pro-lifers.”
...
There’s a legitimate question about whether Team Jeb, and in fact all campaigns, would be better off leaving candidates’ family members out of the debate altogether. Sure, Trump said nice things about his sister, and apparently conservatives have reason to disagree with her, but unless there’s a substantive reason to connect the judge’s views with the candidate’s, it’s a questionable line of attack.

Read more: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/team-jeb-adds-trumps-sister-the-mix

---

Can you smell the desperation?

Take note: when you have raised over $100,000,000 (the most money of any candidate) and have the most endorsements of any candidate in your party and -- despite being born on third base and getting every break -- you're nevertheless polling at single digits, this is what you resort to.