This cracked me up. I got an e-mail yesterday from the National Republican Senate Committee with a link to a YouTube video showcasing a robo-call they're sending out to Pennsylvania Democrats.
Here it is:
Think about the implications here. They're basically saying: "Hey, this guy is so bad, the last Republican president approved of him!"
It doesn't seem so long ago that Republicans were the unquestionably dominant party in the hearts and minds of the American people. How did it get to this point?
You could provide a couple hundred different book-length answers to that question. But when I consider the big picture, I find myself thinking about some intense video game sessions that a couple of friends and I had about a dozen years ago.
My friend got a Playstation, and our game of choice was "Tekken." The rules were simple. You select a character to play, then beat the living crap out of your opponent.
It was two-player, so we'd take turns playing the winner of the previous game. All three of us were pretty evenly matched, so there was a lot of turnover.
Periodically in the course of those sessions, each of us would get to a point where we'd just get in the zone, and absolutely dominate for an extended period of time. But we could never make it last.
We used to wonder why that was. It was a video game, so it's not like we were getting winded. It had to be a mental thing -- some subtle interplay of complacency and mental exhaustion that would eventually set in no matter how hard you tried to stave it off.
I thought one of my friends summed it up well: "It's hard to maintain the will to win."
Nine years ago, before George W. Bush's election, it seemed to me that Democrats didn't have that will to win.
Bill Clinton had been in office for the better part of a decade. His administration was boring. Status quo. At parties, Democrats would lapse into embarassed silence when Republicans started cracking Monica Lewinsky jokes. Idealistic urban hipsters sported Ralph Nader campaign buttons. Pragmatic Democrats supported Al Gore, but didn't seem particularly thrilled about it.
By last October, the situation was a lot different. Democrats were treating Dubya like a walking punchline, and Republicans were pretending he didn't exist. Roads in Central Pennsylvania were full of pickups sporting Ron Paul bumper stickers. Pragmatic Republicans supported John McCain, but didn't seem particularly thrilled about it.
Meanwhile, kids were walking around downtown York in Barack Obama T-shirts, and grownup supporters were bursting into tears at his televised campaign speeches.
The will to win. It comes and goes.
So Democrats should be careful that their winning streak doesn't turn into complacency. Because there's always somebody waiting to pick up that other Playstation controller.
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