Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name

I guess I agree that Mudcat Saunders hasn't covered himself in glory as a guest blogger at Swampland, but I think it's too much to say that the "Actual content of the posts once the blubbering self-pity, crude attacks on large groups of people based on cultural stereotypes straight out of GOP anti-Dean ads, and insincere apologies are boiled off [is] too small to be measured."

Take, for example, this:

“The rural vote determines presidential elections,” said Dee Davis, president of the nonpartisan Center for Rural Strategies, which sponsors the poll. “Democrats don’t win unless they make rural competitive, and Republicans don’t win without a large rural victory. So you’d think that would mean the candidates would have a spirited debate on the things that matter to rural Americans, but we haven’t heard yet.”|Mudcat Saunders|

Ok, so it's actually Dee Davis who's providing the content, but give Saunders credit for highlighting it. What's interesting to me here is that Saunders proposes to deal with the evenly divided electorate not by running a vanilla campaign aimed at so-called swing voters but instead by recapturing voters that the Dems have lost. The idea isn't exactly original, but it's a lot more attractive than the swing voter strategy, and it's good to know that the Edwards camp realizes that a narrowly divided electorate doesn't compel you to run a middle of the road campaign.

Not that there isn't plenty to argue with here. For one thing, the GOP has wounded itself so badly these last few years that it's not so obvious that the electorate is all that evenly divided. More to the point, it's not so clear that it's the rural vote that Dems should be focusing on. Saunders ploy, and this is part of what has pissed off so much of Left Blogistan, is to woo rural voters by triangulating against coastal elites. On the one hand this is a good idea, since the coastal elites aren't about to pick up their toys and go home. On the other hand, it's not really the coastal elites as such who don't fit in a coalition with rural voters. It's all those folks that the coastal elites are tolerant of.