This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Having just watched the long-awaited, one-time-only debate between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican nominee Sharron Angle, I have to say I can’t imagine too many voters were swayed one way or another by what they saw, though the post-debate spin could change things.
The debate format was unusual, to say the least: Every question was essentially a viewer-suggested attack line offered up by the moderator to one candidate or another; indeed, he articulated them with visible emotion, alternatively identifying with angry Tea Partiers or angry progressives.
Reinforcing the sense of Kabuki Theater, both candidates played to type, almost to the point of self-parody. When Sharron Angle wasn’t saying something outrageous, she was blowing dog whistles, repeatedly invoking constitutional originalism and the Tenth Amendment, those hardy perennial symbols of the Tea Party’s desire to return domestic governance to the size and power they maintained during the Coolidge administration. And Harry Reid was the consummate veteran senator, mired in legislative and programmatic language, beginning nearly every answer or rebuttal in mid-sentence, failing to provide the context necessary for viewers to understand his broader message. He was also exceptionally defensive, responding to Angle’s categorical worship of right-wing totems with claims that he’s not all that liberal himself.
The potential gotcha moment in the debate was when Angle, pressed by the moderator, admitted she did not favor any mandates of any sort on insurance companies. Reid stuck to his campaign talking points, decrying Angle’s opposition to mandated coverage for specific procedures, such as mammograms, and missing the chance to destroy her for apparent opposition to any regulation of insurers whatsoever–a position that threatens virtually every Nevada voter with health insurance. Similarly, Reid had a chance to go after Angle’s oft-repeated position favoring privatization of Social Security and Medicare, but his efforts to do so degenerated into a murky argument over various estimates of the solvency of the Social Security fund.
I’m not a Nevadan, and thus have no real sense of how the two candidates came across personally, particularly as compared with prior expectations. But my own impression was that Angle is an amiable kook, and Reid, for better or for worse, is the prime example of that complicated beast, the purple-state Democratic senator. Without question, Angle offered up the biggest targets for post-debate spin, and as we speak, Team Reid is probably coming up with a frightening set of hypotheticals involving her desire for a totally unregulated health insurance market.
As I have been writing this reaction, I’ve been half-listening to another CSPAN debate between Senator Patty Murray and her Republican challenger, Dino Rossi. Compared to the Nevada tilt, it’s coming across like Lincoln-Douglas.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this election cycle is the lesson that most Republicans are going to take from their gains on November 2. In a completely counterintuitive development (though one that had become highly predictable as early as 2006 if not much earlier), the GOP lost two straight elections pretty badly and then responded by moving away from the political “center” at warp speed. And in a vindication of movement conservative strategic arguments that go all the way back to Phyllis Schlafly’s 1964 book, A Choice Not An Echo, it seems to have worked, or at least did not pose any obstacle to a midterm victory. Aside from the exhilirating effect this scenario will have on Tea Party folk and other hard-core conservatives, it will also repudiate a whole generation of “moderate” voices urging Republicans and conservatives to control their ideological impulses in order to appeal to swing voters and win general elections.
The intrepid Dave Weigel got to wondering about those voices, and challenged three of them, David Frum, Reihan Salam, and Ross Douthat, to examine their assumptions.
In Weigel’s summary of the responses he received, Frum posed a short-term/long-term dilemma for Republicans, suggesting that its initial success after moving to the right (attributable to external factors such as the economy) would inevitably produce disastrous and unpopular policies, and generate another round of big political setbacks. (FWIW, that’s pretty much my own view). Salam and Douthat, who have done better than Frum in keeping a toe in the conservative movement while criticizing many of its core tenets, peered sideways at the contemporary Tea Party-oriented GOP and professed to find a validation of their famous Sam’s Club Republicans argument calling for championship of the more conservative policy predilections of non-college-educated white voters.
Weigel’s sardonic rejoinder to these responses was: “It’s an ingenious argument: We’re not wrong. We’re just not yet right.”
But if these “reformers” are indeed right–in the long run if not the short run–then you’d have to figure they would be receiving some support from those non-ideological Republican political pros who are far less interested in destroying the legacy of the New Deal than in building a stable GOP electoral majority.
And there is undoubtedly an implicit belief among Beltway insider types in both parties that after November 2, the “hierarchical” habits of the conservative rank-and-file will lead them meekly into submission to the great big grown-ups who understand you can’t really do what most Republican candidates this year are demanding–a balanced federal budget with more high-end tax cuts and spending cuts that somehow don’t touch cherished domestic programs or the Pentagon. According to this view of the world, the Tea Party Movement will burn itself out, and its activists will happily support a great-big-grown-up presidential candidate like Mitt Romney or Mitch Daniels or Haley Barbourt.
But as Weigel notes, in a follow-up post, if there’s some budding pushback against the proposition that moving right is the path to political victory, it’s awfully quiet:

When a party loses there are two reform factions — the We Were Wrong faction and the Double Down faction. And obviously the Double Down faction won in 2008, because the Republican base really believed that it lost power because it failed to cut taxes and spending. I think that one factor in the abandonment of Frum/Salam/Douthat arguments is that the Republican political leaders who had an incentive, or a record, to argue the other side of this — that would be Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, who saw the governing and political benefits of “compassionate conservatism” — saw where the energy was and moved into flat-out opposition mode.

Indeed, the posture of Karl Rove is particularly interesting. He was, after all, the architect of the three politically motivated Bush administration policy initiatives that have been most often demonized by conservative candidates this year as examples of Republican betrayal of conservative principles: No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Rx drug benefit, and comprehensive immigration reform. But aside from a quickly repudiated dismissal of Christine O’Donnell as an unelectable kook, Rove has gone along cheerfully with the Tea Party conquest of the GOP.
The precise intensity of right-wing pressure on the Republican Party to completely lose its inhibitions may depend on the details of the outcome on November 2. Three especially conservative Senate candidates, in particular, carry a lot of symbolic weight: Sharron Angle, who is challenging the Majority Leader of the Senate; Rand Paul, who already defeated the candidate of the Minority Leader of the Senate; and Pat Toomey, leader of the principal pre-Tea Party organization demanding purges of party heretics, the Club for Growth.
But even if some or all of these candidates lose, it’s reasonable to assume that the post-election argument among Republicans will resemble one of those debates where one candidate refuses to participate: a debate between the move-to-the-right-and-win faction, and an empty chair.

Politico‘s Alexander Burns has an interesting report on the 2010 activities of alleged 2012 Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, comparing his midterm strategy to that of a very famous GOP candidate of the past:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is grinding through the 2010 campaign state by state and district by district, adhering to a go-everywhere, never-say-no campaign schedule that will have recorded visits to 30 states before Election Day.
It’s an approach that sets him apart from other 2012 prospects in its plodding, comprehensive, Nixon-in-’66-like pace.

Other potential 2012 candidates, says Burns, are being far more selective in their midterm campaign activities, with some being constrained by other responsibilities (including elected office) and others focused on early-primary states. Romney’s approach, by contrast, seems to be aimed at creating pockets of support that could sustain a well-known, well-funded candidate like him even if he doesn’t knock out the competition early on:

[B]y establishing himself as a force in states beyond the early-primary circuit of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, Romney’s cementing his role as a party leader and laying the groundwork for a potential nomination fight that lasts well past the first round of small-state elections.
It’s a strategy that recalls former President Richard Nixon’s slow climb back to power after he lost the presidency in 1960 and the California governor’s race two years later: Gearing up to run for president in 1968, Nixon simply outcampaigned his competitors with a frenzy of activity in the 1966 midterms.

A lot has obviously changed since Nixon’s Long March to the nomination in 1968. Only 14 states had primaries that year; the debts Nixon was able to call in for his 1966 campaign activities were often directly redeemable in delegate votes. Even more importantly, Nixon benefitted from poor and irresolute opposition. Nelson Rockefeller decided at the last minute not to run (surprising and angering such early supporters as Spiro T. Agnew), then got back in too late. Mitt’s father, George, self-destructed before the first primary with his “I was brainwashed” comment about Vietnam. Ronald Reagan didn’t enter the race until just prior to the convention. Maybe Mitt Romney will get lucky and such potentially formidable candidates as Sarah Palin and his 2008 nemesis, Mike Huckabee, will take a pass, or will commit some disqualifying mistake. But Nixon’s 1968 luck, like that of John McCain in 2008, won’t be easy to replicate.
If he is indeed contemplating a 2012 strategy of surviving early setbacks and then using his money and national base to grind out a victory, Romney may, as Burns hints, be thinking of a different model: Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, perhaps improved by the kind of attention to small caucus states that ultimately made the difference for Barack Obama. But it’s not entirely clear that Mitt Romney has the kind of celebrity power or hard core of committed supporters that both Democrats enjoyed in 2008. At this point, Romney’s main appeal, beyond his checkbook, is that he’s considered reasonably safe and sane by the news media; and that he’s basically acceptable to the party’s dominant conservative faction (among whom he was the favored candidate in 2008) and about as good as it’s going to get for the shrinking moderate wing. In these qualities he is indeed a lot like Richard Nixon in 1968, but he has a very long way to go to establish himself as The One.

Reid Wilson’s post, “The DNC’s Risky Surge Strategy” at Hotline On Call features an interesting discussion of GOTV strategy differences within the Democratic Party. According to Wilson, the DNC is pushing an emphasis on mobilizing the 15 million new voters who cast their first ballots in the 2008 election (72 percent for Obama), while some Democratic veterans believe, as one senior House leadership aide put it, “I think it’s a better use of resources to go after more reliable voters. They have a 2012 strategy.”
While common sense would urge working the hell out of both constituencies, hard choices have to be made about allocating resources. As Wilson explains the DNC strategy:

Both sides of the family feud are focusing on ground game and voter turnout. The disagreement is over which voters the party should be expending precious dollars trying to turn out.
The White House strategy is focused on an unprecedented effort to turn out the voters who cast their first ballots for Obama in 2008. The Democratic National Committee has pledged $30 million in voter turnout efforts this year, largely geared toward those first-time voters through Organizing for America, the outgrowth of Obama’s political operation.
The DNC estimates that 15 million voters cast their first ballot in 2008. Fully 72 percent of those voters backed Democrats. They are predominantly younger and more ethnically diverse — in other words, the next generation of the Democratic base. Those voters could be key to a number of races in which Democrats and Republicans are running dead even.

Older line Dems take a different view, according to Wilson:

But this strategy relies on the assumption that Obama’s 2008 campaign transformed the electorate that will decide the 2010 midterms…Old school Democrats, mostly affiliated with the labor movement and congressional campaigns, aren’t buying it. They don’t believe the DNC understands what the midterm electorate will really look like.
“The notion that first-time presidential voters will come out in an off year is limited,” said one veteran Democratic strategist closely aligned with labor unions. In 2006, massive efforts to turn out the Democratic base, coupled with a political wave, swept Democrats into power. “If only the party and operatives were focused on getting that turnout in hand before going for extra icing,” this strategist said, “they’d have a far tastier cake.”
Other Democratic groups have taken the more traditional route. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has invested millions in robust field programs in virtually every competitive race in the country, a move that looks likely to pay off in at least a handful of contests. Unions have spent most of their money on turnout as well, forgoing the massive advertising that has become a hallmark of every election season.

Differ as they do, the Democratic factions are working well together, as Wilson notes:

“We’ve been very pleased with the activity, and we’ve been working in full coordination,” said Jon Vogel, the DCCC’s executive director. The DNC is “in the majority of our targeted races. They’re organizing volunteers; they’re organizing get-out-the-vote efforts. And I think that will show through in Election Day results.” J.B. Poersch, Vogel’s counterpart at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, echoed the happy talk. “The DNC’s put a lot of energy in full-time organizers,” he said.

Better-than-expected Democratic turnout of both groups is certainly not out of the question. Exit polls on November 2nd should shed fresh light on the kind of ground game choices which make sense for 2012 — and beyond.

AP’s Phillip Elliot has a disturbing report in WaPo today:

Activists on Wednesday noted that “dozens of tea party-aligned groups have sought records and are planning to visit polling places on Election Day to enforce their own “voter protection” programs.
…And with anger at Washington at a fever pitch and an anti-incumbent sentiment growing, the loosely organized tea party’s efforts to challenge voters on Election Day could dissuade scores of voters from casting ballots, the activists said. Tea party groups from California to Florida have organized to go to polling locations to check registrations themselves.

The primary targets, as usual, would be Latino and African American voters:

“We are worried this year that we could see large-scale efforts to challenge voters at the polls,” said Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan public policy and law institute based at New York University.
Gloria Montano Greene of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials also cautioned that the persistent anti-illegal immigrant fervor could drive down turnout or unfairly target those who appear to be immigrants.
“We know that we continue to face stark levels of voting discrimination around the country,” said Kristen Clarke, co-director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s voter project.

In light of epidemic home foreclosures during the last year and a half, there is also concern about the use of foreclosure lists to cast doubt on voters’ residency and voting eligibility. This was tried by Republicans in Indiana in 2008. A local Republican Party official reportedly said that presence on a foreclosure list “would be a solid basis” to ask someone to cast a provisional ballot.” The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund took legal action and stopped it.
Of all the forms of voter suppression, ‘caging’ seems to be most on the upswing. In his recent report on the right’s voter ‘caging’ initiative in Wisconsin, Josh Dorner at Think Progress has a good one-graph summary of the mechanics and impact of caging:

“Voter caging” is a means of voter suppression and intimidation that involves sending mail to a list of voters, compiling a list of mail pieces returned as undeliverable, and then challenging those voters at the polls or otherwise attempting to remove them from the voter rolls. The mere process of challenging voters can intimidate from voting even if they are eligible, cause long lines to form at polling places that will then discourage others from voting, and may result in eligible voters casting provisional ballots which stand a high likelihood of not being counted in the final tally.

Dorner’s excellent report details the tea party’s role in the Wisconsin voter suppression campaign based on a recording of a tea party meeting, including bragging about voter intimidation involving “a 6’4″, 300-pound man to challenge voters at the polls.”
The thing to keep in mind is that effective caging often depends on using one of two kinds of intimidation at the polls: (A.) goons questioning voters, and/or (B.) using law enforcement and/or trained attorneys to badger voters. The use of legit law enforcement would probably only occur in GOP-friendly jurisdictions. But fake, uniformed “enforcement” personnel have been used effectively to intimidate voters in the past. There is still time for voting rights groups to submit radio and TV public service announcements informing voters that they don’t have to stop and talk to anyone at the polls who doesn’t present legitimate law enforcement credentials.
In his post at Talk Media News, Kyle LeFleur quotes Weiser, who notes that about 3 million people couldn’t vote in 2008 because of registration problems. Weiser worries about the scale of voter suppression operations underway: “This is not something that we have seen for years and it raises significant risk for voters.”
All of which adds up to ominous signs that the GOP and or tea party activists may be assembling a nation-wide voter suppression campaign of unprecedented dimensions. Democrats were caught unprepared by the GOP’s “Brooks Brothers Riot” in 2000, and by the time we got our act together, it was too late. It appears that a massive ‘caging’ initiative is likely underway and we may see tea party goon squads intimidating voters at many polls on election day. This time, let’s be ready.

We’re at the point in this election cycle when final candidate debates are being held in many places, and although they don’t get the kind of national attention that presidential primary and general election debates obtain, they raise a lot of the same questions: Are they worth anything? Can they be made more substantive? Is anybody really paying attention?
There are no easy answers to these questions, as illustrated by two dramatically different takes on last night’s final debate between California gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. At the fine group site Calbuzz, which adopts a notably jaundiced viewpoint of Golden State politics and its practitioners, the debate was described as something of a high point in the campaign:

In a sharp, fast-paced and intelligent debate, managed expertly by former NBC newsman Tom Brokaw, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown gave any voters still undecided about the governor’s race as clear a choice as they could want: a businesswoman focused on private sector jobs and a lifelong public official focused on untangling gridlock in government

That same debate was described rather bitterly by T.A. Frank in The New Republic:

The debate last night between California gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown was pretty awful, but it could have been worse. Yes, the discussion was often superficial and disingenuous, but at least the word “whore” made several appearances. Tom Brokaw was there, too, and it was sort of nice to see him, even if no one had really missed him. The main challenge for viewers was to avoid getting too dispirited by the condition of California (that stubborn socioeconomic death spiral, for example) and instead try to focus on what matters. And those things would be the election-season setbacks and gaffes that–to use a favorite journalistic phrase–“threaten to overshadow” each candidate’s campaign.

Maybe the glass empty/glass full disparity in takes on the debate is attributable to very different expectations; it’s not as though the Calbuzz live-blogger was full of starry-eyed admiration for the candidates:

Tom [Brokaw] waaaayyyy up on Mt. Olympus – JFK’s inaugural address is cited — asks the candidates to tell voters what they – the voters – can do for California.
Meg immediately starts talking about herself. Straight campaign schtick and talking points. Doesn’t answer the question except to say that “What people will have to do is support the next governor,” “pull together” and “there’s going to be some shared sacrifice.”
Brown on talking points too: Can’t point fingers, “rise above the poisonous partisanship” rise above categories and be Californians first. “Some people say this is a failed state – it’s not.” He doesn’t answer either.

This sort of thing appears to drive T.A. Frank crazy, in no small part because the challenges facing the winner defy the sort of breezy can-do talk favored by both candidates:

[B]oth sides probably know that what awaits them in Sacramento is a nearly ungovernable mess. Whitman for some reason thinks that heading up eBay prepares you for this. It makes no sense, but it does appeal to voters dreaming of a new start. Brown, on the other hand, believes he understands Sacramento because he’s been there before. That’s true, but it’s not especially inspiring.

I guess the underlying issue is whether debates that occasionally succeed in luring candidates a few inches away from the focus-group-tested messages they proclaim in their campaign ads are worthwhile, or instead just create a cruel illusion, or worse yet, feature moments of “spontaneity” engineered by moderators firing off gotcha questions on nonsubstantive matters. It’s probably not a good sign that a debate between a candidate as relentlessly programmed as Whitman, and a candidate as endlessly unpredictable as Brown, came across to T.A. Frank as “vacuous.” The two pols are about as different as two members of the same species can get. Getting a useful contrast of their styles and views ought to be pretty easy. If the debates didn’t succeed in doing that, then we have to conclude that for all the trashing of partisanship that’s forever in the air, it’s a good thing there’s a D and an R next to their names to help us keep them clearly apart.

One of the things you hear frequently these days is that whatever happens in the congressional elections on November 2, Republicans are going to be poised to obtain a long-term advantage in the House via control of a greater number of governorships and state legislative chambers just prior to the decennial reapportionment and redistricting process.
But such projections often fail to note that the current House districts were carved out at a time when Republicans held an impressive advantage in the larger states that gained and lost House seats in the 2000 process. At pollster.com, George Mason University’s Michael McDonald supplies an important reminder:

The best case for Republicans is that they will be in the same position as they were ten years ago: they will control the redistricting process in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and they will control a point in the process to block Democrats in California, Illinois, and New York…. We know how well that worked out for them. The best case for Democrats is that they will block Republicans in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and they will control California, Illinois, and New York, a significant improvement from their position ten years ago.

It was conventional wisdom going into 2002 to suggest that Republicans had used redistricting to obtain a “lock” on control of the House. It turned out that the lock lasted exactly two election cycles. And GOPers are very unlikely to do better this time around.
Yes, redistricting matters, but mainly on the margins, and in any event, Democrats may wind up in a stronger position than they were a decade ago.

One of the most frequently-parroted lies of Republican candidates is that organized Labor’s contributions to Democratic candidates is no more transparent than corporate contributions to GOP candidates. Joan McCarter sets the record straight at Daily Kos with her post drawing on Ben Smith’s “Union disclosure unlike other groups‘” at Politico. As McCarter explains:

One of the primary defenses you keep hearing from the astroturf groups and the GOP they’re spending all their millions on is that there’s no difference between what they’re doing and what labor does–campaign spending without disclosure. Politico’s Ben Smith shoots that one down very effectively.

McCarter quotes Smith:

…When it comes to disclosure, talk of unions is a red herring. While they aren’t required by the FEC or IRS to disclose donors, a separate piece of federal law, the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, requires that unions disclose all sources of income that adds up to more than $5,000, a requirement overseen by the Department of Labor. As a result, unions disclose more than many political groups about their internal operations, and certainly more than than do 501(c)(4) nonprofits like Crossroads GPS or 501(c)(6) groups like the Chamber.

Smith quotes SEIU spokesperson Michell Ringuette:

There are strict legal limits that help make our political efforts transparent. Most of our political funding comes from SEIU COPE, which reports its donors on a monthly basis, which cannot accept more than $5000 a year from any one donor, and whose donors overwhelmingly are a hundred thousand low wage workers contributing around $10 a pay period. To the extent we do political work funded by our general treasury, most of which is member to member work funded by and accountable to those same low wage workers. We don’t – and can’t – solicit contributions from non-members. And of course it is disclosed.
The Chamber and the shadowy 527 and c4 groups that have sprung up after Citizens United – perhaps more aptly called corporations united – are conduits for undisclosed corporate money, pure and simple. We are a union of working people, and the money we spend on politics is money donated by workers…

And that’s a huge difference Dems should always note whenever the topic of campaign funding transparency is raised.

J.P. Green’s post earlier today on the possibility of Republicans as a whole becoming dangerously identified with their crazier or more extremist candidates raises a pretty fundamental question about the dynamics of this midterm election: To what extent are voters even paying attention to individual candidates, and how tolerant are they of crackpots?
In answering this question, it’s important to remember some factors that will affect election returns almost automatically. First, and I will keep harping on this so long as so many analysts continue to ignore it, this is a more pro-Republican electorate than the one that voted in 2008 or will vote in 2012, thanks to the age-old disparities in midterm turnout that are particularly damaging to Democrats this year. This gives GOPers something like a five or six percent swing completely separate from anything else that is going on. Second, the economy is in bad shape, and that hurts the party in power no matter how little it did to produce the situation, or how much worse it would be if the other party had been running the country. These are advantages for the GOP that a candidate will have to work pretty hard to lose, particularly in friendly or marginal states. And third, candidate issue positions and ideology are always less clear to voters than to the elites who tend to follow politics closely. It take a fair amount of candidate craziness to break through the broadbased voter consciousness.
The point J.P. is making is that this year’s Republican Party has generated such a bumper crop of craziness that this could be the unusual year when it matters a lot, and his question is whether it’s reached the critical mass necessary to brand the GOP as a whole.
I don’t know the answer to that, and in fact, don’t even know if the most conspicuously extremist Republicans (with the exception of Christine O’Donnell) will suffer enough opprobrium to lose. Democrats should obviously do everything possible to inform voters that there are lots of crazy people whose views are far from the mainstream with an R next to their names on the ballot; it would be political malpractice to do otherwise.
But the good news for Democrats is this: to the extent that Republicans are not held responsible, individually or collectively, for the craziness of their views, they will be lured (or indeed pushed by the radicalized conservatives in their party) into thinking they can be at least moderately deranged in office after November 2, and on the campaign trail in 2012, when the electorate will be more like the one than voted in 2008.

I imagine a group of Democratic Party insiders holed up in an office somewhere in D.C. sorting through videos and photos of various Republican candidates, and one of the Dems sighs and sums it up: “This one puts out a video saying she’s not a witch. Here’s one prancing around in a Nazi uniform. ‘Terror babies,’ census paranoia — We got a bunch of them on video who want to privatize social security, increase medicare deductibles and give huge tax breaks to the rich…I can’t believe we’re losing to these guys.”
By any measure the GOP’s ‘crackpot factor’ is inordinately high this year. No doubt individual Democratic campaigns are making the best of it on a case by case basis. But the question arises, is there some way to amp up the re-branding of the 2010 GOP as the party of crackpots?
The meme is well-established in progressive circles. But there has to be a tipping point at which a healthy chunk of swing voters, including white blue collar workers — the so-called “Reagan Democrats” — think “Jeez, much as I’d like to stick it to the Democrats, the Republicans really do seem to have a lot of crackpots. Hard to see them doing much to get the economy rolling again.”
We may not be quite at the crackpot tipping point point yet, but it shouldn’t take too much more, although time is running out.
As the crackpot factor expands, ridicule becomes a more powerful Democratic weapon. Tina Fey turned Sarah Palin into the laughing stock of America, and there’s an argument — though no data to back it up — indicating that it was devastatingly effective in making a large number of swing voters dismiss the GOP ticket as saddled with a terminal lightweight. Certainly cartoonists are having a field day with the crackpot factor this year (see here, here and here, for example). But we’re not likely to see an SNL skit as politically-potent as Fey’s Palin impersonations for a long time.
I’m worried about the “decoy effect” of one particular crackpot, Christine O’Donnell. She hogs so much media coverage with her ridiculous pronouncements and history, that other deserving Republican crackpots are slipping under the radar. Rand Paul, for example, the uncrowned King of the tea party loonies, who is in a close Senate race with a solid Democratic candidate, Jack Conway, must be thanking his good fortune for O’Donnell every day. Ditto for Sharron Angle.
It’s a lot easier to show voters why a particular candidate is too loony to vote for than it is to re-brand an entire party as too crazy to take seriously. Still, “I don’t know…the Republicans have too many crackpots” is a meme worth encouraging whenever possible. The wild card is the MSM. If it takes root in the next couple of weeks, it might help. A couple of good national ads projecting the meme couldn’t hurt.