The good, the bad and the ugly of the Angle campaign

By Jon Ralston

Friday, June 18, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

As Harry Reid recalibrates his vaporizer to remove the Sue Lowden setting and Sharron Angle somehow survives D.C. and the vast left-wing conspiracy (catch me if you can, liberal media!), here’s your Friday Flash of this week’s events:

• The Angle Introduction Tour, The Good: The newly DeMinted GOP nominee quickly began to raise money at a reported pace of $100,000 a day. GOP senators were thrilled to see that, at first glance, she was not as Palinesque as they feared — several committed to help her raise money and American Crossroads began a Rovian ad for her to christen her nomination. Angle also showed she could quickly pivot on some of her incendiary rhetoric, softening “privatization” of Social Security to “personalization.” She also displayed a remarkable ability — and she has been underestimated on this — to stay on message, which is, to distill: Harry Reid waterboarded the economy, is part of corrupt Washington and should be fired. And all with that Angular smile.

• The Angle Introduction Tour, The Bad: When Republican senators went off script — “We really liked her and she is up to booting Harry” — and began distancing themselves from her positions, that wasn’t helpful. When the most-watched video of her visit was her fleeing down a private hallway, as if going down into a protective bunker, that was not good. And when she was lampooned for doing lapFox interviews and Senate leaders said she would need a few weeks to prepare to talk to the regular lamestream media folks, it seemed as if she was a Bubble Girl who would die if she had contact with anyone other than Sean Hannity or Gretchen Carlson.

• The Angle Introduction Tour, The Ugly: Her showing the hand to the bigfoot media types just made them, as well as the leftist blogosphere, more determined to conduct the equivalent of an archaeological dig into Angle’s past. And what a treasure trove was waiting.

Abortion can cause breast cancer. An oath keeper, but not an Oath Keeper. A call to arms if Congress spends too much. And, worst of all — avert your eyes if you must — she was once a Democrat.

And that was just part of it. Whether it was the product of the Reid opposition research file — think “Ulysses” length but less labyrinthine and more accessible — being spread around or good, investigative journalism, the “Angle is extreme” leitmotif started to reverberate. The grandmotherly former teacher with the ready smile suddenly became a far-right fruitcake who might bring a machine gun into the Capitol.

• A couple of final Friday Flashes:

No. 1 — Here is the seminal question about Angle for anyone who really wants to listen — and I am unsure how many of those folks are left after you excise the Angle-lovers and Reid-haters: What is it in her record that indicates she can be effective in a legislative body?

Angle, for all her conviction and consistency in Carson City, rarely accomplished anything and instead was considered a marginal player. There are those who will say she was effective in highlighting how out of touch her colleagues were with what taxpayers want — or some such rhetoric — but there is little evidence of such.

So if you buy the proposition that it’s fine to send Reid back to The Camp That Didn’t Fail to live out his days, that it’s OK to drop the state from 1 to 100 (in Senate seniority), where is the evidence from the Legislature that Angle can immediately step in and make any difference?

I suppose if all you want her to do is vote “no” where Reid would have voted ”yes” — and vice versa — this discussion, as salient as it may be, is moot.

No. 2 — One phenomenon to keep an eye on this cycle in the Year of Two Reids that I was reminded of this week when The Younger sent out a news release once again trying to morph Brian Sandoval into Jim Gibbons and expressing horror at the state’s abysmal education ranking: For the next few months, Rory Reid is going to be talking about all of the state’s ills and blaming the Republicans — specifically, the governor and the man he will say is his better-dressed clone, Sandoval. Meanwhile, his father will be absorbing fire from Angle and the national GOP for all of the state’s infirmities, which eventually will produce a release headlined, “Maybe Rory should ask Dad why the state is in such bad shape?”

I still think the sports books should put up a prop bet on who appears fewer times together — Reid and Reid or Sandoval and Angle. It could be close.