State Senator Nicholas Kettle has Learned What, Exactly?

Yesterdays’s Projo ran a piece on freshman Senator Nicholas Kettle. Kettle also happens to be the youngest Senator at age 20. You might remember Kettle, who rode into office as a Republican Tea Party candidate with no experience whatsoever. He very soon established his Tea Party bona fides by insulting the homeless community in RI with disdainful and uncaring comments via email.

Here’s the relevant bit from an earlier Projo article:

In an e-mail before the hearing, freshman Sen. Nicholas D. Kettle urged Tea Party supporters to question homeless advocates and “fill up the room before the homeless folks! Help me ask why this homeless person has better clothes than I,” he said.

Kettle promised to ask tough questions and called Tassoni’s hearings a “dog-and-pony show.”

But during the hearing, Kettle apologized for the message, after homeless advocate John Joyce read it aloud and asked why Kettle hated the homeless and the poor.

Kettle said he didn’t hate the homeless, but that he sent the e-mail “out of frustration” and because he thought the hearing was one-sided.

“Don’t apologize to me,” said Joyce, who was once homeless. “Apologize to the homeless people of the state.”

So we have a young Senator making a freshman mistake right out of the box, but the forgiving among us will chalk it all up to a lack of worldly experience. Kettle did apologize after all. He said he does not hate the homeless, but was frustrated by the politics he was encountering.

But that apology rings hollow in light of more recent comments Kettle made. He now claims that one of the main lessons he learned had nothing to do with tolerance or compassion. Instead Kettle has learned the true art of politics. He has learned not to express his true views out loud, but to keep them to himself. He has decided that honestly expressing himself is dangerous.

“Watch what you put in writing,” he says now.

Going from “idealistic” Tea Party darling to disengenuous political hack in just one session has got to be some sort of record.