The "Feingold Kneels before Thompson" Fallacy

There's a meme making the rounds today over a Rasmussen poll putting Russ Feingold 4 points down in a hypothetical race against Tommy Thompson. The operative word here is, of course, hypothetical seeing as Thompson is, once again, releasing one of his time honored trial balloons.

Thompson hasn't run in Wisconsin since 1998. His last campaign -- the 2007 GOP primaries -- brought us such highlights as:

• Colin Powell would be Sec of State in my administration ... again.

• 'Employers should be able to fire employees if they have teh gay' comment...

• ...which he blamed on his need to take a piss.

• ... which he subsequently also blamed on the flu.

• Jewish bonds!

• ... which he blamed on being tired.

And all this happened before he left the race after the Iowa Straw Poll.

In case you haven't noticed the pattern, here it is: Thompson says something stupid, then in an attempt to fix the stupid comment, he goes and makes it worse. Not exactly a good habit to develop if you want to run a successful campaign.

What's all this mean? Thompson is not a homophobic, anti-Semitic, heard-of-hearing, incontinent coot who needs to be put to bed right after Pat Sajak ... but he is old. He's 68 years old and his last remotely competitive campaign was in 1986. Any campaign against Feingold is going to be close and Thompson hasn't demonstrated he has the ability to pull off winning a tight race. He may have name recognition still going for him, but Thompson is well beyond his prime.

As for Aaron Rodriguez's silly post calling Feingold "a run-of-the-mill Democrat who votes party line" (a-hem, Ben Bernanke confirmation ... and that's just what he did to piss off the party today) and the asinine assertion that Feingold's vote against the PATRIOT Act is somehow a knock against him is the stuff of opposition party press releases, not interesting commentary.