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Thursday, March 16, 2006
Moron the Netkooks' Efforts to Unseat CuellarJonathan Gurwitz looks at my favorite story from last week: In the March 7 primary, Mr. Cuellar won with 53% of the vote to Mr. Rodriguez's 41% (a third candidate taking the rest). He increased his margin of victory over Mr. Rodriguez in 2004 in 10 out of 11 counties, besting his principal opponent by nearly 5,600 votes--despite the efforts of the netroots activists. "A lot of energy and money was wasted in the Democratic primary that could have been used to defeat Republicans in November," says Colin Strother, a general consultant for Mr. Cuellar's campaign. "The netroots people took their eyes off the ball--taking the House back from the Republicans," he says. "They only knew one picture. They knew nothing about the district."
Blogger Moulitsas is unapologetic. "So we didn't kill off Cuellar," he wrote in an entry on his blog, "but we gave him an ass whooping where none was expected and made him sweat. That's the reason why Lieberman is sweating in Connecticut," referring to another netroots challenge against another centrist Democrat.
So far, threats like these seem the best the Angry Left can muster. They now have a disastrous 0-17 record stretching back to 2004. The netroots leaders resemble nothing so much as World War I commanders, who after each successive setback maintained that victory was tantalizingly close, and lobbed more artillery shells and threw more troops over the top. Similarly among the netroots, the article of faith is that victory is only a matter of trying harder, upping the rhetoric and raising more money.
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