Obama would have stomped Jack Ryan

Christian Schneider has penned a very silly post suggesting that Jeri Ryan is the woman who changed the world.

Why? Because her revelations in divorce filings about Jack Ryan's abusive behavior (trying to persuade her to have sex with him at Paris sex clubs and then treating her cruelly when she refused) effectively derailed his 2004 bid as the GOP candidate for Illinois' seat in the US Senate. Thus paving the way for Barack Obama to steamroll Alan Keyes and ... beyond.

Here are some key excerpts from Schneider's atomic pantload:

Yet despite running away with the primary, Obama still had a formidable challenge in Republican Jack Ryan.  Ryan was an impressive candidate - attractive and wealthy, with law and business degrees from Harvard.  After making a fortune at Goldman Sachs, Ryan left to teach in an inner city school. ...

And [Obama] may have beaten Jack Ryan on his own.But it’s fascinating to think that the salacious testimony of a woman scorned could one day fundamentally alter the path of the world in which we live.  Without it, Barack Obama could still be sitting in the Illinois statehouse, planning his next political move.

Now, divining the direction of counterfactual histories is a tricky business. But most objective observers would have to agree that Obama would have trumped Jack Ryan if he had been the GOP candidate, regardless of how "impressive" and "attractive" a candidate the abusive Ryan was.

Besides Obama's general superiority as a candidate -- Schneider likes to downplay it, but Obama's shepherding  a bill that required the cops videotape confessions was a masterpiece of politicking (check out the Archpundit quote at the bottom) -- are the brutal facts on the ground for Republican politicians in Illinois.

To wit:

In 2002, the Ds took control of both houses of the legislature (clarification: they took the State Senate, having already controlled the Illinois House) and the governor's mansion.

In 2004, John Kerry won Illinois with 55 percent of the vote -- a margin of 550,000 votes.

In 2006, the popular Republican Judy Baar Topinka was smoked by the ethically challenged and unpopular Dem governor Rod Blagojevich.

Yes, the Illinois GOP has suffered an implosion -- thanks in no small part to the corruption of George Ryan -- that the RPW seems hellbent on imitating.

If Schneider thinks the outlier to this trend of D dominance would have been Ryan defeating Obama -- the same Obama who was redhot after his Democratic convention speech, a performance that Ryan never could match -- he's welcome to believe that. If he believes that more than a half million Illinois voters who voted for Kerry would have voted for Jack Ryan, he's welcome to believe that as well.

Of course, Schneider's point isn't to present realistic counterfactuals. It's to undermine Obama and portray him as a guy who could have been beaten by a candidate more credible than Alan Keyes, who was tapped after every white man in Illinois turned down the job. (You would think that no one wanted to run would give Schneider pause. You would think the fact popular ex-governor Jim Edgar declined to run -- which is why Ryan was in the running in the first place -- would give him pause. But no.)

Indeed, so quick is Schneider to take snide shots at Obama and suggest he doesn't belong in this contest that he makes a whopper of an error. The divorce was not taking place during the election, as Schneider asserts. They were divorced in 1999. You would think that someone who works for an organization with the name "Research" in its title could avoid making such an error.

But facts are truly stupid things in the right wing slime business. Already Schneider's halfwitted work is being carried by the likes of Charlie Sykes and Michelle Malkin and we'll no doubt hear more in this vein should Obama emerge as the Dem nominee.

The Brawler has never been a fan of Schneider's work, so he can't really tell if it's deteriorated since the erstwhile Dennis York went to work for the WPRI. The much-missed Seth Zlotocha did once observe that Schneider's contribution to the health care debate was less than benign.

That said, the Brawler supposes we should be thankful Schneider chose not to illustrate this post with an image of African-American MPS kids looking at a half-naked Jeri Ryan.

UPDATE: Pundit Nation has more.

Comments

[John Foust]

Last summer I fisked an entire essay that Schneider wrote for WPRI on the video competition bill, sentence by horrid paragraph. Chock-full of outright factual errors and distortions: http://www.gojefferson.com/banner/opinion/foust/ab207/