Oh, and I should probably disclaim here: I built Jeff Merkley's website, but I speak only for myself.

Ah, Wonkette.

What was her original claim to fame?

Oh, right. I remember now.

Hmmm... I think you may be confusing Wonkette with Washingtonienne...

ESPN Magazine. Fortune. Wonkette. And on and on.

The amount of national attention that Novick will get is amazing. Right now we're a mid-tier Senate race (8th or 9th). Novick will bring us up, because he makes for such a good story and is such a good candidate.

Sometimes as politicos we stick our heads in the polls and forget the value of a good story.

Blog history: Ana Marie Cox, now with Time, was the original Wonkette. It was she who chronicled the Washingtonienne saga. Wonkette is now a brand with a number of writers, most of whom are men. Weirdly.

What I liked were the Wonkette comments such as:

Novick will restore your faith in politics single-handedly.

and:

As a Senator I am sure Novick will be all-right.

but also:

Did anyone else here read the whole wikipedia article? This guy fucking went to college in his teens because his Jr. high shut down, then graduated Harvard law at 21. Also, he has the rare gift among democrats of calling a spade a spade in very few words. Can we please have Novick for president in 2016? After 8 years of smart black dude, I think we'll be ready for a badass child prodigy gnome who happens to have a couple of half-formed limbs.

The comments get more salty from there.

It's nice every once in a while to get a laugh out of the race. Too many times it seems like a bar brawl.

I know most of the Novick fans I talked to loved it. I especially liked, "He's so adorable! I want to get one!"

I see what might seem harsh (calling a short guy a hobbit, for example), but that stuff just seems to roll of Steve--and there's really a lot of serious admiration coursing through that thread.

I can only say amen to Evan. I will bet anyone $20 he appears on the cover of a major national magazine between the primary and the general if he wins Tuesday. But for every extra cover he makes after the first one, you pay me another $20. We can haggle over what "major" means.

I laughed at the Wonkette post about Novick until I almost cried.

Seriously, is there anyone in the country running for office right now who gets more/better "earned media" than Novick?

"Pirate Jesus" made me weep with laughter.

But seriously, "Black Butte Porter ftw"? Fail. Epic Fail. Does not want.

You people take Rob and Kurt for granted, and you should be punished for it.

Being the leader of the majority means you're responsible for the success or failure of the bills in session. He's certainly taken personal credit for a ream of bills that others championed as hard if not harder, and as leader he's entitled to some extra credit, sure. But he has the accountability when a pet program fails to see enactment.

It is shortsighted and itself rather distortive to pretend that Merkley's responsibility for the bill rests with the final vote of the final bill. Who said it had to be cigarette taxes? (I supported the idea, but it was still the majority's choice, and surely they knew the difficulty). What about holding education funding from coming all the way back in one biennium and cutting some poor kids a break out of the general budget, thus only needing 31 votes?

Or let's ride with the bill that came out. Only through legislative blunder should a clause spelling out 36 votes made it into 3rd reading. That killed any chance for that bill right there. Had it not been there, the Speaker held competing opinions on the number of votes for a referral to raise revenue rather than a straight revenue bill. It was his call. The Leg Counsel opinion is traditionally but not technically binding; it is subject to suit in theory but to my knowledge has not been challenged. The question of standing I would think would turn on the fact that it has to be someone in the House to have been theoretically aggrieved by the "abuse."

And for pity's sake, what rational basis is there for making a referral to the voters subject to a supermajority, when the whole point is to let the voters decide?

All of which is to say that Merkley and his team crafted a specific bill for child health care that did not work. It was all their eggs, and it failed. It is so pathetic that this would be called a distortion, when it's overtly factual: Jeff Merkley failed to pass Healthy Kids legislation. Why? Who can we blame? Well, we can talk about that for hours, can't we? But he did fail. And to get all huffy about being held accountable for the same record he has used as a proxy for his future plans, strikes me as pretty shallow.