The comments to this post are pretty good.

But let me throw this out there and see if the cat licks it up. I know everybody’s orgasmic over this, but come on, hasn’t anybody heard of the expectations game? Has it crossed anybody’s mind that they’re throwing all this shit out there now for a reason?

Why talk about it at all? Why talk loudly and confidently about your party’s free-fall, about a full-scale implosion, 30-seat losses, impeachment scares, OMGWTFBBQ WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE AIEEEE? Why do that? Democrats do that. We rip on each other in public. Republicans do that shit behind the scenes, dead quiet. So what’s the motivation for speaking up now about DOOM DOOM DOOM?

I’m sorry. I hate to be this downer person. I want to be doing what I was doing in 2004 at this time, confidently predicting victory, picking out dancing shoes to wear and wine to drink and fantasizing about redecorating Speaker Pelosi’s office. But there’s just something about all this public GOP griping that strikes me as odd.

Which leads me to the questioning of the 50-state strategy. The bitching about Dean assumes that all Democrats need to do to reconquer the world is to squeak out a majority this fall and then hold on tight, so why not put all the money into the fifteen or so seats we think we can actually win? Why think long-term if we’re not gonna need long-term because wer’e gonna take back Congress?

Well, what if we don’t? What if all the bad signs the Republicans are sending out are just smoke signals, confidential to their base that they need to turn out in the same rabid, drooling, panting mobs that two years ago achieve the stunning leap for mankind that was denying those who like the same sexxorz to have joint health insurance? What if they’re trying to lull us into overconfidence, into figuring fuck it, we’ve got it in the bag? I can hear you thinking it, that oh, shit, she’s gone headfirst into total paranoia but come on, we are so far from having this wrapped up I can’t even see wrapped up from here.

So if we don’t take back Congress this fall, we’ll need the seats Dean’s looking at down the road. We’ll need party operations in states that don’t listen to us because we don’t talk to them. We’ll need to think about appealing to new voters because our present crop is either gonna be enough for a squeak-by election or it’s not gonna be enough, but either way, you can’t govern like that, and we need a farm team. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be straining to win the seats we can win right now. I’m saying there’s no guarantee that’s all we’ll ever need, and somebody needs to be doing the paranoid what-iffing, and looking out for the long term.

And quite frankly, I’ll listen to asshats like Paul Begala when they start talking about how to win, instead of talking about how their boloney has a first name and nobody listens to them anymore. Schmucks.

A.