TPM details the travails--all brought upon himself--of Vaughn Ward, the Republican candidate in Idaho who has made a national name for himself by plagiarizing Obama's 2004 DNC speech, among other things. The author, Ben Frumin, concludes "Worst. Candidate. Ever."
Ben doesn't know Idaho.
Let's revisit just one former actual occupant of the seat Ward is running for. Bill Sali. Who was actually elected to the seat but was re-elected to it [missed that--it just seemed like four years in Idaho).
There's this, too:
You can also see the looooooong list of bizarre votes he took while in office.
Sali is far from the only kook to hold the seat. Let's not forget Helen Chenoweth, who represented Idaho's 1st from 1995-2001.
[S]he scolded Congress after the Oklahoma City federal building bombing for not trying to understand anti-government activists. She also held hearings on "black helicopters," which militia members believed were filled with United Nations-sponsored storm troopers eager to swoop into the broken-down ranches of the rural West and impose international law...
Idaho's wild salmon were not endangered, she said, because she could buy salmon in cans at the grocery store (although what she was buying was farm-raised or Alaskan salmon, which are not endangered). The Internal Revenue Service should be abolished and income taxes replaced with sales taxes, she argued. Yellowstone National Park should be opened to hunters who could kill wolves and elk....
In the mid-1990s, when three Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service offices in the West were firebombed and federal wildlife managers were threatened with death, she introduced a bill that would have required federal agents to get permission from local sheriffs before they could make an arrest or conduct a search on public land.
Civil rights laws protect everyone except white Anglo-Saxon males, she said in 1994. Idaho, which was 96.3 percent white at the time, had plenty of ethnic diversity, she said, although "the warm-climate community just hasn't found the colder climate that attractive. It's an area of America that has simply never attracted the Afro-American or the Hispanic."
No, Ward is weak sauce as far as Idaho Republicans go. Idaho voters aren't going to give a damn whether he knows that Puerto Rico isn't nation. But they might get a little worked up over his deciding to plagiarize from the current Democratic president. Now that, in an Idaho Republican's mind, would be something to be embarrassed about. It's got a lot of play on local television in Boise, so that could be Ward's undoing in today's primary.