Author: Moe_Lane

Another good campaign ad from Joel Demos (R CAND, MN-05).

I am remiss about not writing on it until now: it took The Other McCain to remind me.

Joel’s donations page is here; but I need to point out something that many of you may not want to hear. To wit: there are 430 House races where there is a GOP candidate (which was incredibly good work by the NRCC). Of them, over half are challengers. Of those, the vast majority are fighting uphill battles and are in desperate need of cash. If the “I only give directly to the candidates” strategy we hear so much of actually worked, Joel Demos would have all the money that he needed to give Keith Ellison (who gives away all his campaign money to other candidates) screaming fits. But Joel doesn’t, because it doesn’t work: the money clumps, because people are not equally aware of the merits of every good candidate out there, and there is currently no good mechanism to make people equally aware.

Let me put it another way: if you are counting on me (to personalize this) to tell you who deserves your campaign contributions, stop doing that. I’m a stay-at-home dad who is lucky if I can keep track of thirty House races. We already have organizations that think on a national scale. Join them, and take them over.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: By all means, give Joel some money. He’s doing his best for us in a tough district. But there are a lot of equally-worthy folks out there without Joel’s talent for good, low-cost campaign ads.

Paging Linda McMahon (R CAND, CT-SEN)…

Ace looks upon this video, and declares it the raw material for Linda’s next campaign ad:

…and I heartily agree. For those without video access, it’s from a primary debate between Dick Blumenthal and Merrik Alpert. Alpert pointed out, in so many words, that under Dick’s tenure as Attorney General Connecticut was one of two states* to have a net loss of jobs. And then Alpert proceeded to ask Dick how many jobs his lawsuits created. Dick’s response was that his lawsuits created jobs because businesses love competition.

No, really, that’s what he said. Presumably, Dick’s argument is if he hadn’t done all those lawsuits then Connecticut would have lost even more jobs. Or that it was only through Dick’s regular sacrifices of marmosets to the Great Pumpkin every Roodmass that Connecticut has so far not been swept out to sea by a vengeful tsunami.

Look, it makes just as much sense as Dick’s actual answer, OK?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Linda McMahon for Senate.

*Hi, Governor Jennifer Granholm! Thanks for giving us Michigan! Rick Snyder for Governor!

Davy Plouffe tries to manage expectations.

Plouffe took some time away from his current job – which is to say, rewriting the Democratic party’s rules so as to eliminate any chance of a successful primary challenge to the President in 2012 – to graciously define the Republican party’s November victory conditions for it. Apparently, according to Davy if we’re not “winning back the House, winning back the Senate and winning every major governor’s race” on Election Day then we’ve failed.  Which is an entertaining little argument, and quite clever (for a Democratic strategist), for two reasons.  The first is that it’s essentially unfalsifiable: all a Democrat has to do is declare that a particular governor’s race is ‘major’ and hey presto! – the GOP has failed.

The second reason that this is almost-clever is that while most people can see through that trap, not as many might challenge the underlying assumption that there can be a quantifiable definition of ‘victory’ at all.  Which is blatantly untrue: you see, you can win any number of seats and still not impose your political will on the civic landscape (something that the antiwar movement learned in 2007*).  Put another way: to quote SM Stirling, you win battles not by killing the enemy, but by breaking their hearts and making them run.

Which we are already doing to the Democrats in Congress. That is what victory looks like.

Davy.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Davy Plouffe tries to manage expectations.

The new @McDonalds online Monopoly game is kind of dumb.

I retain a certain fondness for the Scotsman, and I always liked their annual Monopoly-themed prize contest.  The last online one that they had was kind of fun, too: you got to move your piece around the board and not win anything past some downloads and other junk like that, but it was at least giving the illusion that you were playing a game.  Contrasted to that, just picking one card out of three is a kind of lame way to not win anything.  I probably won’t even bother to keep the pieces, this time around.

Honestly, McDonald’s is usually better at this sort of promotion.  What happened?

#rsrh QotD, ‘It’s a HORSE FILM’ edition.

John Nolte (via Ed Driscoll), on a Salon review of new Disney flick Secretariat that reads like someone had lost a bet:

Wow! Cross burning, xenophobia, Leni Riefenstahl, master-race, and whiteness and power, all in a review of a harmless little family flick about a horse. There’s part of me that admires O’Hehir’s ability to summon that kind of rage. Where was he when I couldn’t pull those grocery carts apart?

John’s not kidding; all of those terms are in the review.  Apparently, in this flick Secretariat was a member of ODESSA* – which, ironically, would have made me more likely to watch the film if only the director had had the courage to pursue his inner vision to such an extent.  Or something like that.

Moe Lane

*The Odessa File was actually pretty good, for a potboiler.

#rsrh @maddow, come on over to the Dark Side.

We have cookies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj0YS9RS3Lk

I’m not saying that you have to go Full Metal Pachyderm or anything; but come on. Wouldn’t you rather see Rand Paul in that Senate seat? Honestly and truly? At least he’s not insulting your intelligence like the way that this Conway guy is.

Seriously.  One little bit of independence from the Democratic party line won’t do you any harm.

Moe Lane

PS: Rand Paul for Senate.

Moe Lane

The Inexorable McMahon Job-Creation Ad.

If you missed Dick Blumenthal’s incredibly clueless answer to Linda McMahon’s simple question “How do you create a job?” at the last debate, don’t worry: the McMahon campaign has had boiled it down to a television ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovIBLQyl7HE&feature=player_embedded

And in the process they managed to do what was I would have thought would be the impossible; they managed to cram two minutes of idiocy into a thirty second clip. Including Blumenthal’s rictus grin; as God is my witness, when I watched that originally I fully expected Dick to end his ‘response’ with the happy declaration that he had just done a Number Two in his pants. Continue reading The Inexorable McMahon Job-Creation Ad.

#rsrh Random act of political… optimism?

I got nothing really to base this off of, and I’m writing this while RCP is downgrading the seat – but it feels like Gillibrand’s lead is perilously (to her) shaky and could collapse at any reversal, darn it.  Then again, I’ve always been less willing than many to concede NY, so that may be coloring my perceptions.

Anyway.  DioGuardi for [Senate].  [And here I was happy to have gotten the name spelled right. Thanks, Constant Reader IJB.]