Mike Lawler’s Pathethic Redemption

MAGA-lite Republican Congressman Mike Lawler's DWI arrest comes out, but it was only because his father, a recovering alcoholic, was sick. Another Trumpian hypocrite tries to spin his secret past.

There is a that flavor of Washington honesty that only surfaces when the polling gets ugly. Mike Lawler just gave us a master class in it.

The congressman from New York’s 17th, the seat Democrats have circled as the one they most want back, sat down with a local news crew and confessed. Twelve years ago, on St. Patrick’s Day, he was pulled over on the Palisades Parkway and charged with drunk driving. He’d had a few. He’d just learned his father was gravely ill. He pleaded down to a violation, quietly, in Rockland County, then said nothing about it through two campaigns for Congress and one for the State Legislature. Silence, it turns out, was a strategy. It just had an expiration date.

Now Cait Conley, combat veteran, national security professional, freshly minted Red to Blue star, is closing in and hauling in $1.6 million a quarter. Suddenly Mr. Lawler finds candor. Candor with an expiration date is not candor. It’s messaging.

We’ve all watched enough contrite politicians to know the ch…