The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and it's chairman, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) did an awesome job last year finding good candidates and taking advantage of Republican-American mistakes and a wave of Blue to take the Senate back. No one really expected that Democrats would get both houses of Congress, and even believed going into the summer that the House might not come along. People who said the Senate would fall were usually laughed at.
So I have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they mail me stuff and consider sending them some money. But when I got the piece below in the mail on Saturday I just had to wonder what their messaging people were thinking: in order for the headline to come true, these three vulnerable Republican-American Senators have to win reelection in 2008!
That's right – the DSCC sent out a mailing that, inadvertently I am sure, called for the reelection of Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Pat Roberts (R-KS) and James Inhofe (R-OK). The slug is "3 GOP Senators ... We Need to Keep in the Minority So We Can Accomplish Our Agenda."
Barring the debilitating illness, death or resignation of a Democratic Senator with a Republican-American Governor the Democratic Majority is safe at least through 2008, so the first opportunity for the Republican-Americans to make a comeback is then. All three of these fine fellows are up for reelection in 2008, so in order to keep them in the minority they all have to win.
I'm pretty sure (OK, REALLY sure) that Schumer didn't really mean to ask me to send him money so he could work to reelect Chambliss, Roberts and Inhofe but it's still pretty funny that the highly paid consultants who put this thing together would screw it up so badly.
Unless I totally misread this?
UPDATE: neroden points out something I totally forgot to mention: there are only 21 Republican Senators up for election in 2008. Couldn't the DSCC have picked three of the 28 who weren't running in 2008?
UPDATE II: This is worse than I thought! It turns out that if you type in the URL they gave AS THEY GAVE IT you get an error message. www.dscc.org/IncreaseOurStake returns an error, while www.dscc.org/increaseourstake redirects to the appropriate page.
The point of this post is to suggest that the consultants all our money is going to are incompetent and wasting our cash.
They could have picked three odious Senators not up in 2008 to highlight, or said, "We need to defeat Senators like this to keep our majority!" But they didn't do that, instead using poorly constructed language that doesn't mean what they wanted it to mean and then gave a URL that doesn't work.