Earlier I posted this Begala quote:
What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."
-- Dem strategist Paul Begala on DNC Chair Howard Dean's spending, CNN, 5/11
As I've discussed this quote with several people, one noted:
Can someone please send this jackanape a copy of Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm? The Republicans hired a bunch of staff people to wander around Mississippi and pick their nose in 1962. Worked out terribly for them...
Another pointed to this poll on the Wyoming at-large congressional race:
Wyoming, a state whose electoral votes George W. Bush captured by 40 percentage points in the 2004 presidential election, may grow a bit more blue this fall [...]
The one interesting statewide race is the battle for Wyoming's seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wyoming is one of seven sparsely-populated states which send only a single congressman to that chamber. Since 1942, with one exception, the state's Member-at-Large has been a Republican.
But Representative Barbara Cubin, first elected in 1994, now leads Democratic challenger Gary Trauner by only four percentage points, 47% to 43% and the GOP can hardly take her reelection for granted. This becomes one more contest to which the GOP may have to devote resources during an election year in which the party is proving especially vulnerable.
Congressional Quarterly has just revised its assessment of the seat from "safe" to "Republican favored."
Good thing Dean's DNC has staffers picking their noses as they wander around Wyoming, huh?
If we get a wave election this November, we will win races nowhere near the radar screen. And those races will be more winnable precisely because we are building a party machinery that stretches coast to coast, in every state of the union.
Update: Here are links to two video pieces Tim Tagaris did on those nose-picking Mississippi organizers:
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