For sheer entertainment value, it’s hard to beat Katherine Harris. Now the future Florida senate candidate and partisan icon is claiming she was a victim of the liberal media in 2000.
She doesn’t wear clown make-up in real life, she said.
On Monday, on a conservative radio talk show, Harris, now a congresswoman from Longboat Key running for the U.S. Senate, hit back, blaming newspapers for the criticism and charging that some – without saying which – altered her photographs.
“I’m actually very sensitive about those things, and it’s personally painful,” Harris said when host Sean Hannity asked about her image problems from 2000.
“But they’re outrageously false, No. 1, and No. 2, you know, whenever they made fun of my makeup, it was because the newspapers colorized my photograph,” Harris said.
She didn’t explain what she meant by “colorized.”
Asked Tuesday to point to an altered photograph, Harris and her staff could not.
The main hole in her conspiracy theory is that she was also shown on T.V. — live, up close and personal.
Some political experts say Harris’ charge makes little sense because most Americans got their visual image of Harris from television.
At least two Harris news conferences in November 2000, detailing her decision to enforce a deadline and forbid recount results, got national TV coverage.
“Of course it wasn’t newspapers, it was television,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “I can remember watching her and thinking she learned all the wrong makeup lessons from Al Gore in the debates.”
I do agree that Harris took more criticism for her looks than a man would — say a man with a bad toupee or comb-over (paging Donald Trump). I also feel more favorable toward her for at least showing the good sense to state what the problem was.
“I haven’t worn blue eye shadow since the seventh grade when I was in the Girl Scouts.”
