The Best Candidate Always Wins!
By Chris Clizza’s assertion that Mark Sanford won yesterday because “he was the better candidate and outworked Colbert Busch” is the ultimate in the pundit belief that elections come down to campaign strategy and will. (Cf. also “Al Gore would have totally won Tennessee if he wasn’t such a sellout!”) It’s so obviously false that it doesn’t even rise to the level of tautology. Sanford in fact did remarkably badly for a Republican in SC-1; it’s just that in SC-1 a Republican candidate can be terrible and still win.
For the more transparently hackish version of this kind of argument, see Noemie Emery. Obviously, it’s very common for people who want to assume that the public really agrees with them about everything to assume that every electoral defeat must be the result of a bad salesperson, but attributing political supergenius to someone you’ve been criticizing as politically inept for years does make the con (whether of self or others) transparent.