GOP CLAIMS THEY KEEP LOSING SPECIAL ELECTIONS BECAUSE THEY HAVE CRAPPY CANDIDATES RATHER THAN CRAPPY POSITIONS

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Republicans, starting with Tom Cole, are just not getting the message from the Specials. Republicans are losing-- not just long shot races in Massachusetts and California, but the ones they should be winning with no problems, open seats in disproportionately red districts. Their reactionary policies are not what Americans want to hear; their messaging is atrocious; their strategy-- Reverend Wright-- is worse. But party officials are blaming everything and everyone but themselves. Yesterday it was all about how if they could have only spent more millions on smearing Don Cazayoux as though he were a participant in some kind of Pelosi-Obama-Wright cabal they would have won. When they started dumping millions of dollars into cynical and idiotic ads Cazayoux was ahead 49-46%. When the ballots were counted 3 weeks later, Cazayoux won 49-46%-- and the GOP and their shady front groups were out several million dollars.

In today's CongressDaily there are a couple of stories, one from pollster Charlie Cook and one from Erin McPike, dealing with the GOP inability to deal with reality. As usual, Cook, is propping up his GOP pals and making the excuses for them that they want out there. Straight from Cole's spin factory, Cook tries to make the collapsing Republican Party look lie just another tough day at the country club. "It is very easy, often tempting, to over-interpret the meaning of a special congressional election. Many read great importance into the results of a single congressional district and try to extrapolate that meaning to 434 other districts for the next election. The truth is that there are often unique or local circumstances that play an important role in determining the outcome of the election. They don't call these contests 'special' for nothing."

No, they don't. And no one ever called Charlie Cook a pathetic and disingenuous hack without reason. There's a war going on inside the Republican House caucus and Cook's pal, NRCC head Tom Cole, is a Mississippi mile millimeter from being ignominiously dumped overboard. There is no love lost between Cole and Minority leader John Boehner. One of his allies says Cole is "wrong. If it's a national referendum on the GOP, that's bad, because people don't like us right now."

Even Cook admits that it's "tempting, if one is on the losing side of a special election, to rationalize the outcome, to focus exclusively on the unusual circumstances and deny larger truths that emerge from that or from a pattern of special elections." He then goes on to parrot the spin from the Cole camp in regard to Saturday's catastrophe, namely that it was all the terrible candidate's fault:

Republicans got saddled with a candidate who, to a certain extent, was the Pelican State's answer to Florida's former Rep. Katherine Harris.

Just as Harris couldn't lose a statewide primary and couldn't win a statewide general election, longtime conservative activist and former state legislator Woody Jenkins was very difficult to beat in a closed GOP primary but entered into a general election with a walk-in closet of political and personal baggage.

Jenkins came in on the short side of the 49-46 percent race, but a weekend in Baton Rouge last month convinced me that few thought Woody would win even then, though few thought he would lose badly either-- the district is too Republican for that.

A generic Republican would have outperformed Woody.

Similarly, the GOP loss in March of Illinois' 14th District-- formerly held by Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and which President Bush won with 54 percent in 2000, 55 percent in 2004-- also featured another statewide loser of a Republican nominee, dairy magnate Jim Oberweis.

Oberweis brought his own complete set of Samsonite into the race, Democrats dubbed him "the Milk Dud," and the voters went with now-Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill.

In both of these cases, again, there were unique circumstances: tough GOP primaries produced weak, ideological candidates.

Had Republicans been able to nominate better candidates in each case, they might have held onto the seats. To their credit, the National Republican Congressional Committee folks understood from the beginning that they faced significant challenges in both districts.

This is laughable spin. Doug Thornell of the DCCC sounds like he is peeing in his pants when he points out that his Republican counterparts "have painted themselves into a corner with a batch of flawed candidates out of touch with their districts. That, coupled with an extremely tarnished brand, a nonexistent message, a president with historically high disapproval numbers, and a nominee campaigning for a third Bush term makes their climb all the more arduous in November."

A week from today there's another Special (MS-01) pitting conservative Democrat Travis Childers against exactly the kind of cookie-cutter, or in Cook's terms, "generic," Republican they think they can win with. And maybe they can. The district, after all, has a PVI of R +10 and if they can't hold onto a seat in a district that Republican they might as well fold up the tents right now. Cook/Cole notes that Democrat Travis Childers beat the generic Davis in the primary (which he was just 410 votes away from the magic 50% that would have mooted the need for a runoff) because it "was a nonpartisan election, and their parties were not on the ballot."

Cole insists on sticking with his losing strategy of running superfluous negative advertising but he is already setting up excuses in case it doesn't work again. Cook presages next Wednesday's spin:

As is often the case, there are unusual circumstances besides the nonpartisan nature of the election in this district. Davis is from the section of the district comprised pretty much of Memphis, Tenn., suburbs. Childers is from the non-Memphis, or one might say anti-Memphis, part of the district. This situation has a lot more to do with geography than partisan politics.

But even Cook, albeit way at the end of the story, had to admit that Cole's spin about why his Louisiana strategy was sound, is absolute nonsense. "Much is being made of the fact that Republicans aired advertising tying the Democratic candidates in Louisiana and Mississippi to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, and his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, despite the fact that there is no evidence that either Democrat ever met Obama or Wright. [Cole's team is] arguing that the ads took what would have been a Democratic runaway election and turned it close. Democrats are arguing that the ads didn't work. I never saw any polls showing a Cazayoux landslide. Indeed, the polls in the closing weeks were fairly close to the actual election result."

And even though the tsunami of discontent hasn't hit the Senate side yet-- only because there have been no Specials there-- the NRSC's hapless chair, John Ensign, is also desperate to do some spinning of his own. He claims the victories in 2006 by Jim Webb (D-VA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Jon Tester (D-MT), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) were not won on a populist Democratic message. "I don't think anybody in their right mind thought that they won on that... They won on an unpopular president. You combine the war, George Bush and the scandals, and those all combined to make a very tough Election Day for us." Poor fella... two years later, the war is worse, the GOP senators, lead by Miss McConnell are more rubber stampy and completely obstructionist, Bush is far more hated than he was in 2006 and scandals? You want scandals? As I was sitting down to write this, the entire Alaska Republican Party is in jeopardy of going to prison on corruption charges and this morning the FBI was raiding the home and the office of corrupt Bush hack Scott Bloch. Wall Street Journal: "Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided the Office of Special Counsel here, seizing computers and documents belonging to the agency chief Scott Bloch and staff. More than a dozen FBI agents served grand jury subpoenas shortly after 10 a.m., shutting down the agency's computer network and searching its offices, as well as Mr. Bloch's home. Employees said the searches appeared focused on alleged obstruction of justice by Mr. Bloch during the course of an 2006 inquiry into his conduct in office."

Newt Gingrich is working from different motivations and isn't spinning as furiously as Cole, Boehner and Ensign. He wrote in today's Human Events that, in effect, Charlie Cook should pull his head out of Tom Cole's ass and get a grip:

Republican loss in the special election for Louisiana's Sixth Congressional District last Saturday should be a sharp wake up call for Republicans: Either Congressional Republicans are going to chart a bold course of real change or they are going to suffer decisive losses this November.
The facts are clear and compelling.

Saturday's loss was in a district that President Bush carried by 19 percentage points in 2004 and that the Republicans have held since 1975.

This defeat follows on the loss of Speaker Hastert's seat in Illinois. That seat had been held by a Republican for 76 years with the single exception of the 1974 Watergate election when the Democrats held it for one term. That same seat had been carried by President Bush 55-44% in 2004.

These two special elections validate a national polling pattern that is bad news for Republicans. According to a New York Times/CBS Poll, Americans disapprove of the President's job performance by 63 to 28 (and he has been below 40% job approval since December 2006, the longest such period for any president in the history of polling).

A separate New York Times/CBS Poll shows that a full 81 percent of Americans believe the economy is on the wrong track.

The current generic ballot for Congress according to the NY Times/CBS poll is 50 to 32 in favor of the Democrats. That is an 18-point margin, reminiscent of the depths of the Watergate disaster.

While we're waiting for Cole and Ensign to spin that, here's a little message for them: