Margaret Carlson, Columnist

Wendy Davis’s Essential Truthiness

January 22, 2014 at 3:30 PM UTC

Margaret Carlson was a White House correspondent for Time, a weekly panelist on CNN’s “Capital Gang” and an editor at the New Republic.

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In politics, lying is the new sex. Even the lesser sin, exaggeration, is grounds for questions about your suitability to run for office. Americans may be becoming more like the French in tolerating peccadilloes (just ask Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina or Senator David Vitter of Louisiana about surviving a sex scandal), but get a detail wrong about whether you divorced at 21 or at 19, and woe unto you.

That’s what happened to Wendy Davis over the weekend.