Yesterday, I received an interesting piece of spam from Richard Lugar’s campaign. I call it “interesting” because it indicates that Lugar apparently intends to court voters who might be contemplating a vote for Richard Mourdock by calling them morons. And then speaking to them as if they were morons:
Unfortunately, a large number of Republican County Chairmen have been duped into participating in the same failed scheme that resulted in Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle and cost us two crucial Senate Seats in 2010. (If the Republican parties in Delaware, Nevada, and Colorado had taken the Reagan “big tent” approach, we would have already repealed Obamacare.) Mr. Mourdock has hired the same consultants that brought us these unelectable candidates, and with Mr. Donnelly joining the race the pattern is complete.
A few things. First, while a candidate might think voters are morons for not wanting to vote for him, it is generally a bad idea to say it out loud, on the off chance that some of those voters might be persuaded to come home.
Second, while I agree that O’Donnell and Angle were bad candidates (and strongly disagree on Buck), it’s ridiculous to claim that the GOP would have done better if it had nominated the candidates who were routed by the aforementioned bad candidates in the primary. This is the same line of thinking that posits that we lost to Obama because McCain was such a crappy candidate, and we should have instead nominated… one of the people who lost to McCain. Does not compute.
Third, math is apparently not a strong suit of Dick Lugar. The GOP currently controls 47 seats in the Senate. Adding three more seats (CO, NV, DE) would put us at 50. Thus, even supposing Castle would vote to repeal Obamacare, the best we could accomplish on an Obamacare repeal vote would be a tie, which would be broken by Joe Biden. Which is completely academic anyway, since a) the Democrats would filibuster the vote and b) failing all of that, Obama would just veto it. But, yeah, if those TEA Party people weren’t such morons, we’d totally have repealed Obamacare by now.
We’re not halfway through 2011, and RIchard Lugar’s campaign already smells of desperation. The main obstacle to his defeat at this point is disunity among the many groups of people Richard Lugar is currently insulting.
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