When you run for any office you raise money and fight the fight from the day you announce your candidacy to the last minute that the polls are open on election day. You owe that to democracy and to the voters. Unless, of course, you’re part of the inside the beltway conventional wisdom cocktail weenie circuit:

Most Outrageous, Absurd Candidates of 2010

By Stuart Rothenberg

Roll Call Contributing Writer

Nov. 18, 2010, Midnight

….Tommy Sowers (Missouri). The Democrat raised just shy of $1.5 million through Oct. 13 and yet drew only 29 percent of the vote in a campaign that stands out for being about nothing but smoke and mirrors.

….Still, even I am stunned at the absurdity of the campaign.

….Another Feifs e-mail [from Sowers’ campaign], this one on Nov. 1, the day before the election, went further: “In thousands of conversations with undecided voters in the district, Republicans and Independents tell us that they’re voting for a Democrat for the first time.”

As with most direct mail, the assertions here are propaganda, exaggeration, distortion and fiction. Still, isn’t there something at least a little wrong with prying cash out of people by leading them to believe that you can win when you can’t? Or were the Sowers folks so politically inept that in late October they thought their candidate could win?….

[emphasis added in original]

“…by leading them to believe that you can win when you can’t?…” Says who? That’s why we have an “election day” where people “vote” for candidates.

What’s absurd is that the punditocracy thinks that incumbents anointed by conventional wisdom should be given a free pass or face token candidates who just go through the motions.

Asshole.

I’ll take a candidate like Tommy Sowers any day.