Harry Reid's Getting an Angle on His Survival Chances

If Republicans nominate Sharron Angle as their Senate nominee next week, could majority leader Harry Reid, beleaguered, fatigued, unpopular, pull off an upset win? You betcha. 

Remember, it's one of the two "mainstream" Republican candidates in the race, Sue Lowden, who had problems explaining how the state's residents could barter for their health care. Lowden may pull off a win next week, but she's run a fairly atrocious campaign, one that a competent Democrat could exploit with ease. 

Angle -- she's something else. Democrats hope she makes Rand Paul look like Trey Grayson.  For one thing, she has some tangential but already exploited connections to Scientology. She supported a prison rehab bill that would have included massages for prisoners -- a bill that's been taken out of context, but she's already been mocked for it. Also, she doesn't seem to like beer very much. Beer's being legally consumed, that is. Oh, and she supports reprocessing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, arguably the one thing that Harry Reid's enemies give him credit for opposing. Lowden's campaign charges that Angle, who is campaigning across the state on a pick-up truck, illegally used private planes.

But she's as anti-tax as you can get, and she cottons to spending like matter to anti-matter. The  Club for Growth and the Tea Party Express are pulling out all the stops for her. Here's a new TPE fundraising solicitation:

Can you imagine Defeating Harry Reid and replacing him with a Conservative Republican like Sharron Angle who has been to 16 tea party rallies? She's an authentic constitutional conservative - one of the best candidates we have running in the nation. And we no longer can wait to take action - we must act now in this critical final week of the campaign.

The pattern this cycle -- Republicans find ideologically acceptable candidates, and then voters throw them out in favor of "authentic" quirky newcomers, is worrysome enough even to conservatives who believe that the media is accentuating the chuckleheadedness of the Republican nominees.