Is this true? Of course not.
But, what if I sent a glossy color mailer to every household in Wisconsin saying that David Blaska threw a bag of kittens into the Yahara, with a picture of kittens in burlap bag, a grainy picture of Blaska, and a whole list of footnotes supposedly documenting Blanda's imaginary act?
That's exactly what Ron Johnson did days before the election, except for alleging Feingold threw kittens into a river, it alleged he voted to spend 25 million on snow making equipment for a Vermont ski resort-- a sin about as bad to many fiscally cognizant Wisconsites. The Johnson mailer was as bogus as my alleging that Blaska drowned kittens, but unlike this silly blog post, the Johnson campaign refused to apologize or retract the mailer that went to every household in Wisconsin and wouldn't even discuss with it any members of the media in the days before the election.
The end result? The vast majority of Wisconsinites voted in the election knowing of Johnson's allegation that Feingold had voted to fund snow making equipment and only a handful had seen last-second media reports reporting on how the mailer was false.
For the sake of argument, are those people that voted against Feingold because of that mailer, stupid? No, of course not. They were intentionally misled by the Johnson campaign.
Unfortunately, the bogus mailer was one of a long, long line of completly bogus attacks Johnson and his allies made on Feingold. Feingold simply did not have the resources to respond to all of them and refused to respond with equally negative counter-punches, because he wanted to stay on the high road.
In a nutshell, Bill Leuders wrote a column a few days ago pointing out the fact that most voters went into the voting booth with false charges against Feingold and having erronous information about Johnson in their head and that enough swing voters were "duped" into voting for Johnson for him to pull out a narrow victory.
Leuders also included a quote from a poli-sci professor saying that most voters were "stupid." This was a poor choice of words and got picked up by the national media, but clearly he wasn't saying stupid as in not-smart, it was stupid as in as in being misinformed.
Blaska jumped on the "stupid" comment to opportunistically lay himself on the proverbial railroad tracks and play the victim, crying that Lueders was calling him stupid. Obviously Leuders point wasn't that people that voted for Johnson were "stupid," but that many were intentionally misinformed and lied to by the Johnson campaign.
The same kind of "stupid" as people might be if they heard from me that Blaska drowned kittens in the Yahara.