A very interesting e-mail from Salt Lake City:

John,

  • A week before the Cannon/Jacob election, the Salt Lake Tribune turned Jacob’s Satan remark into a front page story. It was a skillful hatchet job that obliterated his campaign and hit the national news.
  • Tom Tancredo’s PAC sponsored some particularly nasty ads against Cannon, that had Jacob apologizing on radio constantly for the last two weeks about non-authorized ads. Big momentum loser and got Jacob significantly off message.
  • Jacob was helping out a Chilean student couple by giving them some work. Work while a student is a no-no. Also an electability no-no when running an illegal alien enforcement platform.
  • There was a full court press to re-elect Cannon including a radio endorsement from GW himself right up to the end in a state that was hugely for GW in 2004.

Jacob either shot or had someone else shoot himself in both feet numerous times. If he was the incumbent, he might have lost. The moral of the story is no matter what your message, you lose elections when you lose your initiative. He lost the initiative in an uphill battle and lost. As others have said on the Corner today, this election has warnings for everybody on a lot of different levels. The election was so tainted that it lost its illegal alien bellwether status.

Me: Reporting on the Satan remark doesn’t strike me as a “hatchet job.” It appears Jacob has a major screw loose on the issue. But the e-mailer is right: This wasn’t a pure test of the restrictionist-vs.-non-restrictionist battle. The thing is, there never is such a thing as a pure test in politics, except maybe when Walter Mondale made the political blunder of the millennium by saying he’d raise taxes in 1984.