How to Lose an Election

Everyone is more than happy to offer advice on what you, as a candidate, should do or say in order to win an election. However, to my knowledge, no has bothered to address the other side of the issue: what should you do if you want to lose the same election.

Let's take a look at a few "guaranteed loser" tactics taken from the recent headlines.

1. Take yourself entirely too seriously.

Role Models: Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Jimmy Carter, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden, John Edwards, and the entire Kennedy family.

Some things simply don't require an explanation. This happens to be one of them.

2. Hire the most incompetent campaign staff that misspent money can buy.

Role Model: Hillary Clinton

Let's see: Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson, Patti Solis Doyle, and occasional guest appearances by James Carvill and Howard Dean. This crowd has been on the losing side in more elections that Wendell Willkie, Tom Dewey, and Harold Stassen combined!

With advisors like these you can lose any election, even if you're the only candidate on the ballot.

3. Once you have assembled the most dysfunctional support staff since the Third Reich, ignore its advice.

Role Model: Hillary Clinton

Until he was forced out of his job this past April, Mark Penn was the Madam Senator's chief campaign strategist. A year previously he had suggested, via an e-mail that eventually fell into the hands of Atlantic magazine editor and noveaux Clinton-hater Joshua Green, that Clinton should attack Sen. Obama on the grounds that "all of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii ..." show just how far he was from mainstream America.

Senator Clinton, not wishing to defend herself against the inevitable charges of racism, did not do so. Now, fast forward to one year later to see the results of ignoring that advice.

The senator, now in the battle of her political life and behind on all 3 scorecards, has to attack Senator Obama's lack of roots within mainstream America!

And who says that God doesn't have a sense of humor?

4. Underestimate your opponent.

Role Model: Hillary Clinton

This tactic was successfully used by Sen. Clinton to lose the Presidency even before she was nominated as the Democratic candidate. I'll spare you the gory details.

5. Overestimate the gullibility of the American voter.

Role Model: (Fill in the blank)

Let me see if I have this straight.

Jeremiah Wright made gave only one sermon trashing America and he was thoughtful enough to wait until Barak Obama wasn't present in the pews that one Sunday morning before making a bigger ass of himself than Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan combined?

Yeah, right!

6. Have a spouse that doesn't know when to keep his/her mouth shut.

Role Model: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama

Picking a role model for this tactic was actually pretty easy when you pause to consider what damages the spouses in question have done to their husband's/ wife's campaign. In respect to the now hopelessly outdated custom, it's ladies first.

Michelle Obama's "... for the first time I'm proud of my country ..." remark raised almost as many eyebrows as it did blood pressures on both sides of the political fence. I suppose that it's just a coincidence that you haven't heard a total of 10 words out of Mrs. Senator Obama in the last 6 months.

Bill, of course, just had to run his mouth in South Carolina, a state that the Clinton campaign had already written off as a lost cause. What the Hell was he even doing in South Carolina in the first place?

7. Never waste an opportunity to blame someone else for your own mistakes.

Role Model: Howard Wolfson

In addition to Moe, Larry, and Curley (mentioned above), consider Howard Wolfson's suggestion that, had John Edwards (Hypocrite-North Carolina) "come clean" about his extramarital goings-on, Hillary could have used Edwards' supporters to lock up the nomination before Obama got his feet planted at the starting gate.

Do I taste sour grapes?

I'm sure that there are many other election-losing tactics that could be, and probably are, being used by candidates in this year's "dupe-the-voters" traveling medicine shows.

The late Rod Serling seems to be the first one to have gotten it right when it comes to describing the collective insults to our intelligence known as politics. Remember how he would close each episode?

"... even here, in the Twilight Zone."