Duck Season

This Democratic meme that Republicans don't win elections legitimately is really starting to piss me off. It's been one of the talking points of the far left since Florida, and now it seems the Democratic Party is adopting this pathetic line of rhetoric. Consider this radio ad from Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat in the gubernatorial race against Republican Bobby Jindal in Louisiana: "Now Kathleen is in the fight of her political life against the hand-picked candidate of the right-wing Republicans, backed by Mike Foster, the Republican White House, and their millions of dollars." (Emphasis added) I know this is a political ad and you're not supposed to tell the whole truth, but this is ridiculous. Jindal made it to the November ballot by finishing first in the October non-partisan primary and got almost twice as many votes as the next two vote-getters combined. So to say that Jindal was "hand-picked" by the party is to say that voters are morons and don't know what they're doing when they're voting for Republicans.

Which, it seems, has been the Democrats' rhetoric in other races as well. They blamed losing the California recall on Arnold's star power and completely glossed over Davis's unpopularity, Bustamente's lackluster campaign, and the Democrats' refusal to put a real Democratic candidate on the ballot. They blamed losing the 2002 Minnesota Senate race on the Republicans' spin on the Wellstone funeral, completely ignoring the fact that many voters saw it themselves on television and came to the conclusion themselves that the Democrats were using it as a political rally (to say that the Republican spin worked is also to say that the voters were too stupid to determine for themselves). They blamed losing the 2002 Senate race in Georgia on Republicans allegedly questioning Max Cleland's patriotism, and not on his insistence that incompetent Homeland Security union employees can't be fired.

When you add it all up, there's a pattern by Democrats of "Republicans use dirty tactics and the voters are too stupid to see through it." They never lose elections because the Republicans had a better candidate or they ran a better campaign; no, it has to be something sinister or illegal by the other side. This is usually the point when someone fair-and-balanced say, "to be fair, Republicans do it too", but the fact is, they don't, at least not recently. There were no complaints when Mary Landrieu won the Senate race in Louisiana, no complaints of election fraud or calls for a recount when the Republicans lost a Senate seat by 500 votes in South Dakota, and no chants of "Democrats are stealing the election" when the Democrats use the courts in New Jersey to replace Robert Torricelli on the ballot with Frank Leutenberg for the Senate when the law plainly states that they can't do it within 60 days of an election.

If the Democrats are going to continue insisting that voters are too stupid to vote for them, I might have to prove them right on a regular basis.