Sen. Kelly Ayotte Flubs Her Veepstakes Audition

On Meet the Press Sunday, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte auditioned to become Mitt Romney’s running mate. She probably shouldn’t wait around for a callback. Reviewers panned Ayotte’s performance for both substance and style.

The Washington Post Fact Checker awarded Ayotte Two Pinocchios (significant omissions and/or exaggerations) for the examples she cited of burdensome regulations supposedly imposed by the Obama administration.

Ayotte was technically wrong about the Labor Department proposals. She said the rules would mean that “teenagers can’t work on their family farms.”

No child of any age is barred from doing any type of work — no matter how hazardous — on farms fully owned or operated by family, nor are they prohibited outright from doing agricultural work for farms owned or operated only partially by family. The senator’s comment about the proposals was misleading, if not factually incorrect.

As for the Boeing case, the National Labor Relations Board dropped its complaint after the airplane maker struck a deal to extend its contract with union workers, and perhaps because the complaint drew so much criticism.

In both examples of supposed regulatory overreach, the issues went away, in part because the Obama administration bowed to pressure.

The Washington Post’s Nia-Malika Henderson mocked Ayotte, saying she violated the first rule of being considered for vice president by aggressively campaigning for it.

You know, I think at some point she actually left her resume there and was passing it around. … I think in some ways she was breaking the first rule of being in the veepstakes, which is that you don’t seem to want the job. You don’t campaign so openly for the job. … Very surprising that she had done that. … But boy, she certainly seems to want the job.