MY GUT SENSE IS THAT THIS WILL BE A FOOTNOTE

Everybody in the blogosphere is talking about that prank call -- the one in which a writer for Buffalo's Beast posed as right-wing gazillionaire David Koch and had a lovely chat with Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

I'm willing to believe that the public doesn't want union rights utterly eviscerated, and therefore the GOP and the right are losing the public opinion war in this case. But I think when the history of this is written, the phone call will be a footnote.

That's just my gut sense -- and I'll confess that I'm saying this even though I'm the only political blogger in America who still hasn't listened to the full audio. But think about it: unless you're the kind of person who's surrounded by politics junkies or political pros, how many people do you know who even know who David Koch and his brother are? By comparison, thanks to saturation coverage by the right-wing media, George Soros is practically a household name -- hell, people who aren't portrayed as evil satanic billionaires, the likes of Bill Ayers and Frances Fox Piven and Van Jones and Cass Sunstein, are almost certainly far better known. There's been a fitful effort to turn the Kochs into the embodiment of what's wrong with the right, but the idea has caught on only with a small group of lefties.

I'm glad this happened, for the few of us who get the joke, and maybe for the benefit of thick-headed mainstream journalists who think lefty talk about the Kochs is paranoid. But I really can't see how it's going to have a huge impact.