What catalyzes this letter is a campaign phone call I received last night. A bright young woman calling on behalf of your campaign in northern Virginia asked if I would mind listening to a message from you. Well, certainly. And then your voice came on. You said you wanted to return power to the people, to good old regular folks like me. You said it was time to take the power away from the politicians in Washington. You said we needed to return to a government of common sense. You said something about emphasizing our conservative values. And you thanked me for listening.

And that was it. There was as much substance as cotton candy, except that it was like stale, three-week-old cotton candy because the phrases were so pathetically hackneyed.

Well, senator, the overall effect was virtually an insult to my intelligence. A drunk Hollywood hack writing for a third-rate sitcom could have typed out those exact same words while in the midst of delirium tremens, as an intentional parody of what a hack conservative politician sounds like. Hacks know how to sound like hacks under almost any circumstance.

And this wasn’t some campaign volunteer reading a script. It was a recording you yourself produced. It was what you thought the ordinary voter would want to hear. But come on, senator: Do you really think the ordinary voter is that stupid? The things you said are the sorts of things a candidate says as part of verbal transitions to the real meat, the real substance, of his message. They are not the sorts of things that are substantive in themselves.

What the heck did they expect?