Reality Check Time

I've been reading the various self-congratulatory posts about Yearly Kos (a lot of shoulder dislocation going on due to excessive patting of selves on back), and I'd like to point out the pile of manure in the middle of the room.

Francine Busby lost an incredibly close house race in a formerly uncontestable district and the blogosphere did pretty much jack-shit to help her. Less than 4% points difference in a race where she was outspent 2 to 1, and where the district is majority Republican. Bilbray didn't even pull 50%, and he has 100% name recognition in this town. This seat is as safe as any Rethug seat could be, and they barely eked it out.

Had she won this race, it wouldn't just have been a surprising victory for a Dem in a Republican district. It would have been a Democrat picking up the seat of the biggest name Republican convicted of corruption thus far. It would have cemented corruption as the central election issue. It would have put the nation on notice that the Rethugs are incredibly vulnerable, and for all the right reasons.

Read the blogs today and all you find is giddiness over Ned Lamont's anemic poll numbers, basically unchanged since the convention, and much crowing about the power of the left blogosphere. What mentions there are of Busby are dismissive - That gaffe! Handing the enemy their electoral talking points, tch, tch...

Why wasn't the blogosphere "on fire" with Busbymania? Was it because she was a frumpy women's studies professor in a remote corner of the country who isn't the best public speaker in the world? Here's a clue - there's only one Barack Obama, and if you sit on your asses waiting for him to move to your congressional district, you'll be waiting a long time. You're going to have to vote for the boring ones, too, if you want a majority in the House.

Now, lucky for those of you who weren't paying attention the first time around, Francine is coming back in November, as determined as ever. So, when Ned loses the August primary, why don't you redirect your rage over Holy Joe into something useful - like doing some major fund raising for her? Who knows, you might even increase the Democratic congressional delegation's numbers, something you can't do with Lamont.

Anglachel