The Occasional Observer

I guess some stories are just too much fun to fade away. The champions of "vote early, vote often" and the "keep 'em coming" ongoing Washington gubenatorial election just love to point fingers. Paranoia about the VRWC lives on. But still, as I read this unhinged rant from RFK, Jr., I had to keep asking myself, "why now?"

Normally, I'd just assume the answer was more of the same: liberal detachment from reality, desire to joust with windmills, etc. But low and behold, about half way down page 1, I came across a more definitive answer:

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

You had to know that the prospect of a Governor Blackwell would scare the heck out of the Dems on the national level. Well here, apparently, is their plan to keep Blackwell on the defensive and question his credibility, in a state where the GOP has a definite credibility problem right now.

Luckily, as even RFK points out, not even the Dem propaganda machine (the MSM) was willing to go bat on this issue:

The national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,'' and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale."

My gut is that this effort will backfire. More importantly, it shows me just how important the Dems view Blackwell to be, and how much he could mean to the GOP on a national level down the line.

Cross-posted at RedState (originally posted 6/01/2006).