Months of silence is also an answer

There is a school of political communication that holds you should never feed a story. Say nothing, let the cycle exhaust itself, and in ten days the internet will find somebody else. It is decent advice and it works more often than reporters like to admit. Sen. Catherine Miranda has been running that play since March, and it is worth asking what it bought her.

The underlying event was brief. In a Senate Education Committee hearing, Miranda responded to testimony from former Utah State volleyball captain Kaylie Ray by remarking that Ray looked pretty healthy and very much in shape and strong, then asking how competitive she really thought she was. Reasonable people can argue about whether that was a clumsy attempt at an athletic comparison or something worse. What is not arguable is that it was the opening of her remarks, that it concerned the witness rather than the bill, and that it was recorded.

What happened next is the part that interests me. Nothing. No statement from her office. No clarification. No response to repeated requests for comment from the outlet that broke the story. Ray publicly invited her to talk privately, in March, and got no reply.

That is a defensible call for about a week. Stretched across months it stops being message discipline and becomes a position. Ray has drawn the obvious inference: her silence to me is that she’s doubled-down. I do not know whether that is what Miranda intends, and neither does anyone else, which is precisely the problem with saying nothing. You forfeit the ability to be understood, and someone else supplies the interpretation.

The strategy also failed on its own terms, because the story kept moving without her. HCR 2003, the measure she opposed and called out of touch, cleared the Senate. Ray got a second round of national coverage on the strength of the bill’s progress and used it to return to the hearing, which is what happens when one party to a dispute keeps talking and the other does not. Ray’s framing was straightforward: this is what the people want, safe places for our daughters to achieve and excel, and it’s not about exclusion, it’s about including those girls who are losing opportunities to boys.

You can disagree with every word of that. Miranda plainly does. She had a real argument available to her, and she has made versions of it before, that the bill targets a tiny population, that enforcement invites intrusive scrutiny of teenagers, that the Legislature has more urgent business. Any of those would have been a fight on ground she chose. Instead the only Miranda quote in circulation is the one about how Ray looks.

Ray twisted the knife with a line that would have been unavailable if anyone had defended the senator. None of her supporters reached out to me, Ray said. Which begs the question, does she have any supporters? I’m not sure. That is unfair as analysis and effective as rhetoric, and it landed because there was nothing else in the space.

The exit was always cheap and it is still open. Ray said plainly what she would accept: I think if she were to give me a genuine apology I would accept it. She added that she would want to see some action showing understanding, which is a higher bar, but the first step costs a paragraph. A senator who said she regretted opening with a comment about a witness’s build, and who then restated her policy objection in full, would have ended this in a morning and probably earned grudging credit from people inclined to dislike her.

None of this requires believing Miranda is a bad person, and I do not think the hearing establishes that. It requires believing she made an unforced error and then compounded it with a communications choice that treats her own constituents as a weather system to be waited out. The first is human. The second is a habit worth naming, because it is now general practice at every level of American politics and it is making public officials worse at their jobs.

The bill moved. The clip is permanent. The apology is still unwritten. Somewhere in there is a lesson about what silence actually costs, and I suspect it is not the lesson the consultants are teaching.

See an error? Email corrections@saguarosignal.com. We append material corrections to the article.