Dan McGrath on election night (www.startribune.com).
by Steve Timmer
Nov 11, 2012, 11:30 AM

Jason Lewis: bilious dead ender

Pity Jason Lewis. If you must. Believing the polls were skewed, and that Election Day would be another station on the cross to state and national redemption and return to a kinder and gentler time for conservatives — 1850 — he must have figured that coming up in the rotation on the op-ed page at the Strib today, November 11th, would be his chance to take a flatulent chug around the bases. Alas, as we know, it wasn’t to be.

Now, he’s just a pocket of resistance.

Imagine Jason after the election, sitting at his desk in the dark, a small desk lamp casting a pool of light on a wide-ruled tablet and a pencil and Jason’s tumbler of purplish-inky bile on the rocks, and Jason drumming his fingers and trying to figure out what to write. Finally, an idea comes to him, and the words flow, except for his periodic need to refresh the point of his pencil with his penknife. After coming up with his lede, it was easy:

Given the multitude of scurrilous attacks on the voter ID amendment, it is somewhat amazing it did as well as it did. Opponents, organized primarily through an umbrella group called Our Vote, Our Future, raised massive sums of left-wing money and easily outspent the proamendment [sic] forces.

What is obvious, Jason, is that as people became aware of what was really in the amendment, it sloughed off support like a white guy with a really bad sunburn. This canker had the support of some 80% of voters in one opinion poll some time ago, but it wound up with 46.4% in the only poll that counts. And that support was dropping quickly. It would almost be fun to see if anybody would have voted for it by Christmas. Well, Jason would have, of course. And maybe Matt Birk and Pat Boone, but it would have been voter fraud if they did, because neither one is a resident of the state.

Jason complains about the ad done by Governors Arne Carlson and Mark Dayton. It clearly did have an effect, but he doesn’t point to anything in the ad that was wrong. Because he can’t. Just as every time Dan McGrath said that the anti-amendment forces’s cost estimates for the amendment were wrong, he couldn’t tell them how they were wrong.

On issue after issue, it was the pro-amendment side that cornered the market of mendacity, such as dead people voting or the future of vouching under the amendment. But let’s save a special contempt for the centerpiece argument of the pro-amendment side: we have felons voting when they aren’t supposed to. A problem that a voter ID wouldn’t solve, at least not without a lot of back office work. And the Minnesota Legislature did pass a bill to address the felon voting problem a few years ago, but Tim Pawlenty, now a banker’s mouthpiece, vetoed it.

And nobody, including Matt Birk, Pat Boone, Dan McGrath, and Jason Lewis, came up with a case of voter impersonation.

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