CA: The Kaus Campaign

Blogger Mickey Kaus is running a longshot campaign against incumbent Barbara Boxer for the Democratic Senate nomination in California. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Earlier this week, while Boxer was raising some serious cash with President Obama at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, Kaus invited her to debate him down the street at a Holiday Inn on Van Ness Avenue. “All she had to do was show up and have at it,” Kaus said. She did not. So someone stuck an empty cardboard box on a lectern as her stand-in. “The box was on the defensive the entire debate,” Kaus wrote on his campaign blog.

“At one point, I called her ma’am,” Kaus told us. Then he played the now-famous audio clip of Boxer objecting to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers brigadier general addressing her as “ma’am” last year. (“You know, do me a favor,” a prickly Boxer interjected. “Could you say ‘senator’ instead of ma’am?”)

(Carly Fiorina, one of the trio of Republican candidates vying to face Boxer in November, gets lots of mileage from that incident of apparent tone-deafness on Boxer’s part.)

But Kaus played it strictly for laughs. “I don’t have any personal objection to Boxer,” he said. “She reminds me of all the women I’ve tried to date -- sharp, smart, short and a little insecure.”