Political ads are so routinely unfair that they have to violate the barely there norms of what everyone knows are propaganda communications pretty flagrantly just to stand out as any more deceptive than average. Yet the conservative Club for Growth’s political action committee has managed to achieve this dubious distinction with its misleading recent attack on GOP U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Roger Marshall, who is running to replace his fellow Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts.
If you didn’t have your glasses on, you might think that the full-page newspaper ads in The Star, The Wichita Eagle and the Topeka Capital-Journal had been bought and paid for by outraged former patients who feel they were mistreated by Dr. Roger Marshall, who is an ob-gyn. But no, they weren’t.
“Arrogant, insensitive, no bedside manner,” says someone named Sunny, who was apparently being quoted from an online review.
“He does not listen. He has his own agenda,” says Jeanie.
A patient named Tammy is quoted twice: “Dr. Marshall has an incredible ego and is remarkably vain.” And, “my visit with Dr. Marshall was hands down the worst obgyn experience of my life…His bedside manner is awful.”
Now, at a moment when we’re relying on doctors to help us survive COVID-19 — and when Dr. Anthony Fauci, our leading expert on infectious diseases, whose statements we can always count on to be accurate, is a true national hero — it’s important to remember how much we all depend on medical professionals.
But even if anonymous Tammy, Jeanie and Sunny are absolutely right, their comments make Marshall sound like so many other doctors that arrogance and absence of empathy have become as much a stereotype as poor handwriting. And because these reviews allege vanity and arrogance rather than any actionable wrongdoing, the question it raises is really what this has to do with his Senate campaign.
When we called the small-government Club for Growth, and asked the real problem with Marshall, spokesman Joe Kilday was refreshingly frank: “It’s spending. That’s the issue.”
MARSHALL IS VYING for the GOP nomination in a field that includes former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, who ran a lazy, losing gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Laura Kelly in the 2018 governor’s race, and state Senate President Susan Wagle. Most Democrats hope Kobach is the nominee, because they feel he’d be most likely to lose to another doctor, Democratic candidate and Kansas lawmaker, Sen. Barbara Bollier. Teacher and Manhattan, Kansas, Mayor Usha Reddi is also running as a Democrat but has paused her campaign “temporarily,” she said on Twitter, “as we all face the urgency of overcoming the COVID-19 crisis.”
In a statement about the Club for Growth ad, Marshall spokesman Brent Robertson said, “Slinging amateur garbage from their office in D.C. during an international pandemic isn’t surprising coming from them … While we understand that they have a 2016 campaign grudge when we beat their candidate by 14 points, they put the Senate Majority at risk by doing the dirty work of fellow loser Kris Kobach.”
The anti-Marshall ad also invites former patients to log onto RogerMarshallTruth.com and share any criticism they might have. Here’s ours: Roger Marshall visited kids in cages at the border last summer and proclaimed our treatment of them “adequate, with lots of room for improvement.”
The same conditions that a pediatrician who examined migrant children in detention in McAllen, Texas, said could be compared to those in “torture facilities” convinced the obstetrician from Great Bend, Kansas, that at least “we’re trying.” We’re not sure what kind of doctor or public servant that makes him.
But if the Club for Growth sees Marshall as too big a spender, they should run ads against him on that basis rather than highlighting generic, anonymous complaints that imply he’s guilty of something terrible without ever spelling out what that something is.
