The following two paragraphs in E.J. Dionne's "Profiles in Courage" piece this morning caught my eye.  Dionne was praising some freshman Democrats from districts Obama lost who had the cojones to vote for the cap and trade bill despite the certainty that they'd face Republican attack ads for doing soj. 

Still, for many potentially vulnerable Democrats who backed the bill, there will be short-run political pain. Perriello and Markey were among 14 House members targeted by the National Republican Congressional Committee for their votes. In Perriello's case, a tough television ad predicts huge increases in electricity prices.

Perriello is philosophical about the assault, though he says he's surprised that Republicans are "using information they know is fundamentally wrong." He plans to use the July 4th weekend in his district to talk about the urgency of energy independence and the potential for renewable-energy jobs. Perriello's fate will be a test of just how new our politics have become.

He's "surprised that Republicans are 'using information they know is fundementally wrong'"?  I don't think he's surprised that they're lying.  He's clearly been in politics long enough to know that that's a "because their lips are moving" thing.  No, evidently, he's looking at it from a professional politician's standpoint and thinks putting out ads that make scary predictions that they have to know will be proven ridiculously wrong later is evidence of surprising political ineptitude.

He may be right.  One of the tracks my needle keeps getting stuck in (yeah, there's a metaphor guarenteed to blow past a lot of the twenty-somethings) is that the Republicans don't seem to be institutionally capable of understanding the extent to which the ground has shifted beneath them.  They spent twenty or thirty years working with a model of the electorate that assumed that the attractiveness of a talking point to a majority of the voters was inversely proportional to its stupidity.  They got good results from that model for decades and they're really having trouble letting go of it just because it failed them in two elections in a row. 

Which is why I expect they'll keep harping on this same point, no matter how ridiculously wrong they're proven later.  They believe it will work because they still fondly recall the days when the majority of the poor, working class and middle class voters in enough states to give them 270+ electoral votes were convinced, absolutely, inalterably convinced that Bill Clinton Raised Their Taxes! 

I remember those days well.  The belief that Bill Clinton Raised My Taxes! was one of the most important factors that kept North Carolina bright red from 1994 until 2006.  It was amazing to behold when you ran up against it with someone you considered a friend or a friendly acquaintance.  Some co-worker would go off on Bill and you'd ask them, "why are you so mad?" and invariably they'd spit back: "because Bill Clinton Raised My Taxes!"  At that point, my legal training and my inner adolescent redneck boy's love of experimentin' would take over I'd have to cross examine them a bit, just by way of psychological field test.  "Really?" I'd say,  "did your withholding go up?"  "When did that happen?"  "How much was it?"  Like that.   

Once, I got a coworker so incensed by this line of questioning that she dug out a direct deposit stub from three years earlier, compared it to a recent one, and triumphantly showed me that her withholding had, in fact, gone up.  (Yeah, she was so mad, she didn't even mind showing me how much she made.)  I then pointed out that her base salary had gone up and I convinced her do the math.  She did it, saw that the numbers on her marginal tax rate were basically the same, did the math on her state witholding, saw that they were the same and then did the math on her FICA.  All the same except for a little movement on the right side of the decimal point that even she didn't quibble over. 

She did the math and it didn't change a thing.  Despite the evidence right there in front of her, despite the fact that she did the math herself, she still knew with absolute certainty that Bill Clinton Raised Her Taxes! 

And yes, I know that, at his initiative, Congress did bump up the gasoline tax at the same time it added a new top marginal rate for people who made much more than this lady (and I) did.  I even conceded that to her.  "Yes," I said, "Congress bumped up the price of gas a few cents, but that's not what you're talking about is it?"  "No, dammit!" she said.  "I don't know what's going on with these numbers, but I know He Raised My Taxes!" 

I swear I'm not making this up.  She wasn't dumb.  Not a bit of it.  But this is the Bible Belt, she went to a Baptist school and her certainty that Bill Clinton Raised Her Taxes was of a piece with her certainty that Jesus rose from the tomb and the creation story of Genesis was literally true.  I'd be willing to bet she believes it to this day. 

That's what the Republicans are counting on.  These ads, and this talking point, will never stop.  No objective evidence will make them stop.  They're going to scream from the mountaintops and from the steeples and pulpits that B. Hussein Obama Raised Your Electricity Bill and they really believe that people will buy it even when their power bills don't spike. Better still, they think that from now on, any increases that would have occurred regardless of whether htis bill passes will now be blamed on Obama. 

And why not?  It worked before.  I wish I was totally confident they're wrong.  But I have some nagging doubts because, see, there's this lady I know who is still, to this day, absolutely, positively certain that Bill Clinton Raised Her Taxes.