Via Hot Air Headlines comes your feel-good news of the morning:

During his whirlwind visit to Las Vegas two weeks ago, President Barack Obama mentioned U.S. Sen. Harry Reid by name four dozen times, gave him a big hug and talked him up as if he was a long-lost brother.

[snip]

A larger percentage of voters surveyed (17 percent) said they would be less likely to vote for Reid following the president’s visit than said they would be more likely to vote for him (7 percent). Seventy-five percent said Obama’s visit would have no effect on how they vote.

The administration is claiming – now – that the President wasn’t in Nevada to stump for Reid (he certainly wasn’t there to apologize to Nevadans for slamming Las Vegas again), mostly because the administration has far too many people in it who discount the average intelligence of the average American voter.  Meanwhile, they found a political science guy* willing to claim that this isn’t as bad as it looks, because it’s only likely voters that got surveyed, and the President was trying to shore up Reid’s support among registered voters.

No, really.

At any rate, if President Obama feels up to it I’d personally like him to extend his tour.  Could he actively support and stump for every Democrat on this, this, and this list?  Particularly the ones particularly at-risk.  That’d be a help, thanks.

Moe Lane

*I’m putting this under the fold because it’s not really relevant to the main point, but should be addressed. The guy in question was described as “Mark Peplowski, a political science professor at the College of Southern Nevada.” CSN is a community college; Peplowski is an adviser for a ostensibly nonpartisan group (which is to say, they have Republicans who hate conservatives, too**), not to mention a local attorney and former judge. Of course, if they mentioned that last bit on his CV they’d have to mention the entire ‘arrested for soliciting a hooker‘ thing.

Is any of this relevant to the guy’s (pretty dunderhead) argument that it makes more sense to consider Reid’s registered/adult voter support rather than likely voter support?  Nope: and if I did argue that it was relevant to his argument, it’d be the very definition of the ad hominem fallacy.  But at the very least the article should have mentioned the existing political bias.  Open partisans showing open partisanship is much less objectionable than quiet partisans hiding behind objectivity.  If for no other reason than when the latter gets revealed, it calls into question the objectivity of the news organization that used the partisan as an authority.

**Always look at the blogroll. Always look at the blogroll.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.