Michigan Republican Terri Lynn Land is making up excuses and making demands as she tries to dodge an endorsement meeting with the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press—and the newspaper’s editorial page editor is describing her actions as blackmail. Land’s campaign claims she won’t meet with the Free Press editorial board until the newspaper apologizes for an op-ed about her.
Land is hanging her refusal to attend an endorsement meeting on a line by columnist Brian Dickerson, characterizing Land as “about as accessible up to this point in her campaign as a music video diva recovering from plastic surgery.” There’s a small problem with Land’s outrage, though: the timeline. The Free Press first started trying to schedule an endorsement meeting with her in late September. The column was printed on October 4.
Henderson said the Land campaign has “dodged” their request for an endorsement interview for more than a month. After sending an initial invitation in late September and answering some questions from the campaign, the paper sent a second invitation on Oct. 6.
The first they heard from the campaign was on Wednesday, when the blast email said the campaign was calling on the Free Press to “to correct (a) sexist attack on Terri Lynn Land.” For Land to be “open to considering a meeting” with the Free Press editorial board, they would first have to correct the “deeply offensive” column.
In other words, Land’s campaign was looking around for an excuse not to meet with the Free Press and settled on a column they hadn’t made a fuss about when it originally ran. While the “music video diva recovering from plastic surgery” line may not have been the best choice any columnist has ever made, it’s hardly the kind of horrific offense that would make the average candidate boycott a major endorsement opportunity.
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If Land doesn’t want to keep being slammed for being absent on the campaign trail, she might consider … not being absent on the campaign trail.
