Another Liberal Fraud: "Naperville Nurse" Has Never Nursed a Day in Her Life
It’s the perfect political nickname: “The Naperville Nurse.” It automatically conjures up images of a medical professional who’s endured years of schooling, works grueling shifts and cares for patients. Then, they turn their eye to the political arena, where they can care for their constituents with the same kind of tenacity they displayed in the ICU. You’ve even got alliteration going on. The whole thing couldn’t be more copacetic.
If you’re going to pull it off, however, it helps if you’ve actually ever done nursing.
You wouldn’t know that Lauren Underwood had never spent a day doing actual nursing if you looked at some of the fawning media profiles of her: “A Naperville nurse and health policy expert is making her first bid for elected office by running for Congress next year in the 14th District,” a 2017 article in the Chicago Daily Herald began.
The “Naperville Nurse” ended up winning the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 14th Congressional District and now holds a roughly even chance of unseating GOP incumbent Randy Hultgren. Now that the election is getting a bit closer, however, the media is kind of being more realistic about Underwood’s nursing bona fides than the Daily Herald was in 2017.
“In college, congressional candidate Lauren Underwood studied to be a nurse,” a Friday profile of the candidate in the Kane County Reporter read. “Not that she ever aspired to work with actual patients.
“Her University of Michigan classmates spent their summers working at hospitals, assisting doctors and learning on the job. But Underwood headed to Washington, D.C., instead, to intern for then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama.
“’ICU (intensive care unit) or mother-baby, like that just wasn’t my interest,’ she told former Obama campaign staffer turned podcaster Ravi Gupta on his show, ‘The Arena,’ back in April. ‘I always knew that this policy space was where I would land.'”
Well, I have to say that beats the usual poli sci or pre-law path to Establishmentville that most wannabe politicians take, at least in terms of creativity. However, that makes at least half of the “Naperville Nurse” moniker a bit, well, misleading.
The other half is pretty much bunkum, too.
The Kane County Reporter noted Underwood “just moved back to her native Naperville last year. And while she’s registered to practice nursing, she never has, in Illinois, nor anywhere else.
“That Underwood never actually worked as a nurse — in college or after graduation — might come as a surprise to voters in the 14th Congressional District, now familiar with the torrent of television advertisements depicting her with a stethoscope serving patients.”
I suppose that Underwood has trained to be a nurse more than I have, but I also don’t go around posting viral videos of myself giving old people in hospital gowns reflex tests, and then turning to the camera and saying, “You know, ‘Beto’ O’Rourke is the biggest fraud in Texas since Enron.”
Oh, and those commercials are hilarious, too.
“In her first commercial, Underwood strolls out into what looks like a doctor’s waiting room, a stethoscope around her neck and clipboard in her hand,” the Reporter noted. “Underwood introduces herself. ‘As a registered nurse, treating patients …’
“The spot was actually shot in a Naperville dentist’s office, White Eagle Dentistry, a few blocks from her parents home in the White Eagle Golf Club subdivision.”
Yet, the establishment media has managed to let Underwood get away with this nonsense. If she gets elected, it’ll almost entirely be based on an image haphazardly constructed but allowed to persist because the media couldn’t care less.
Behind that image is nothing more than another prospective Washington lifer. She just managed to get creative in hiding it. More power to her, I suppose, but that doesn’t make her any less of a fake.
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