GOP Hill staffer Scott Graves is retiring his cheeky license plate, WTF 44, following my story yesterday identifying him as the owner of the apparently Obama-bashing Texas tags. “When I realized the meaning could be misconstrued, I ordered new plates,” Graves, the legislative director for Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), told Texas’ San Angelo Standard Times in a statement. It seems a bit hard to imagine that Graves was not aware, at the very least, of the meaning of WTF. In fact, he used this shorthand in the appropriate context on his Twitter feed.
So, if not a political jab at the president, what did the plate mean? Graves, via Conaway’s press secretary, Sam Ray, did not elaborate to the Standard Times. Nor did Ray provide an alternative explanation when I contacted him for comment. Ray did speculate, weakly, that “maybe that was his number in football” after I suggested that perhaps WTF could stand for “West Texas Football.” (Hey, I watch Friday Night Lights.) In any event, Ray never got back to me on what WTF 44 “really” meant.
It seems Conaway’s staffers have chosen the strategy of just playing dumb on the matter. The Standard Times Washington correspondent, Trish Choate, was accidentally cc’d on some internal correspondence related to the plates issue. She reports:
??In an email addressing Ray but also sent to the Standard-Times’ Washington correspondent and Graves, Chief of Staff Richard Hudson referred to “KMC”—Kenneth Michael Conaway, saying: “Give KMC a ‘heads-up.’ When she talks to KMC next and she asks him about it, he just needs to decline to discuss his employees’ personal vehicles. Or say something like, I didn’t know about the plates, but I understand he’s changed them.”
There is one remaining question: Now that Graves is trading in his old plates, how should he personalize his new ones?
