WHY CAN'T DEMOCRATS START BUILDING SOME CEILINGS OVER REPUBLICANS?

Right-wingers are reacting giddily to new information from pollster Scott Rasmussen:

A recent Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey featur[ed] a match-up between Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul...

Among all voters, Clinton attracts 48% support. Among the voters who have never heard of Ron Paul or don't know enough to have an opinion, guess what. Clinton attracts the exact same total--48% of the vote. So whether or not people have heard of Ron Paul as the challenger, support for Clinton doesn't change....

Looking at other recent match-ups confirms the sense that what we're seeing is primarily a reflection of attitudes about the Democratic frontrunner. In the latest Rasmussen Reports polling, Clinton gets 47% against Fred Thompson, 48% against Mitt Romney, 48% against Mike Huckabee, 44% against Rudy Giuliani, and 44% against John McCain....

The point being, apparently, that Hillary's support can't possibly exceed 48%, even if she's running against the Charles Manson/Paris Hilton ticket.

This leads a blogger called the Influence Peddler to ask, "Is Hillary a sure loser?," and Jim Geraghty of National Review Online to write about Hillary's "cast-iron low ceiling."

Well, if there's a ceiling limiting how high Hillary Clinton's percentage of the vote can go, it's because Republicans and their fellow travelers and enablers in the media have spent fifteen years building the ceiling. Which makes me wonder: When the hell are Democrats going to start building ceilings above Republican candidates? When, for that matter, are they going to start building a ceiling above the Republican Party itself?

For decades, Republicans have lovingly constructed a grotesque, repulsive Democrat caricature that's succeeded in making many people -- not all of them self-styled conservatives -- feel that they couldn't possibly vote Democratic, ever. You know the drill: Godless hippie tax-and-spend socialist America-hating peaceniks. Bizarrely, Bill and Hillary Clinton are regarded as the absolute embodiment of this caricature.

And beyond the caricature, Republicans won't run against any Democratic opponent in a big race without an individualized, road-tested campaign of character assassination. Did you hear Osama -- I mean Obama -- is secretly a Muslim? How about those John Edwards haircuts? And how did John Kerry really get those Purple Hearts -- he shot himself, didn't he?

Right now, you'd think Democrats wouldn't have to resort to lies, half-truths, or innuendo to put a ceiling on Republicans' chances. You'd think all they've have to say about them is: They're Republicans. They're the people who brought you the Iraq War. They're the people who screwed up the Katrina cleanup. They're the people who like our health-care system the way it is. They're the people who want to force your relatives to vegetate in a hospital bed forever.

And you'd think by now the Democrats would have found at least one or two specific lines of attack concerning the GOP front-runners that have the potential to go viral outside lefty-political-maven circles.

But no. Democrats don't play that way. Democrats don't go on offense. Democrats get attacked and scramble to survive.

Usually they don't succeed.

There are exceptions (e.g., 2006), but so far this is a textbook election cycle, with Democrats under attack and Republicans not under attack.

So, yeah, Hillary Clinton has a ceiling. Obama and Edwards would have ceilings, too, if they were front-runners.

But for Romney and Giuliani, it looks as if the sky's the limit.