Kate-bashing bandwagon: It’s really difficult to refrain from piling on Katherine Harris’ Senate campaign when she continually provides incentives like her diatribes about religion, morality and politics delivered last week that seem designed to make folks wonder if her relationship with reality is a bit tenuous at times. It just provides plenty of fodder for pundits to play with.

For instance, here are some examples from today’s Tampa Tribune:

Would anyone be surprised to discover Harris staffers tunneling under West Shore Boulevard, hoping to make a run for it before the candidate goes into another of her meltdowns that make Joan Crawford look like Miss Piggy?
….
For, to Harris, her mouth has become a weapon of mass discombobulation.
….
It was bad enough that Harris comes off as something akin to Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” meets Courtney Love.
….

At least that’s more entertaining than the Orlando Sentinel’s frantic hand-wringing in an editorial yesterday that virtually begged Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to endorse Will McBride, one of three Republican candidiates running against Harris in the primary:

For the good of his party and, indeed, for the good of a political system that relies on vigorous debate of real ideas, it’s time for Gov. Jeb Bush to get involved in this race as he has in other Republican primaries. There is still time for Mr. Bush to endorse Orange County attorney Will McBride in Tuesday’s primary. Mr. McBride has the resources to run a campaign statewide and stands clearly as the Republicans’ best candidate.

The fear among Florida Republicans is that Harris will get 40 percent of the vote in the primary and the other three Repug candidiates will divvy up the other 60 percent, in effect, conquering themselves and any chance of the party beating incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson, who leads Harris in the polls by more than 30 percent.

The Sentinel sums up its editorial with the now de rigeur Harris bash, albeit one that rises no higher than fifth grade level:

Rather than attempt election to the U.S. Senate, Ms. Harris ought to enroll in a high school civics course.

Ouch, that had to hurt coming from a conservative fish wrapper like the Orlando Sentinel. But only look to the loftier levels of right-wing publishing and you can find some really damning stuff — the conservative New Republic, no less. Here, we get not only a better quality of Harris insults, but some insightful (and patriarchal) historical context:

Not very long ago, the term conservatives most often used to describe Katherine Harris was “rock star.” Writing in The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz praised her as “a local official in Florida who looked to the letter of the law for guidance at a time when we needed the law the most.” Among conservatives, this was one of the more measured assessments. In the eyes of her admirers, she was Mother Teresa, Marie Curie, and Joan of Arc all rolled into one–passionate, deeply moral, and honest as the day is long. Not only that, she was also smart as a whip and a looker to boot. (”In person, Mrs. Harris comes across as brainy, ultrapetite and softly glamorous,” reported The Washington Times.)

In the last few months, though, many of Harris’s starry-eyed fans have undertaken a critical reappraisal of their erstwhile heroine. It turns out that she may not be a paragon of sound judgment after all. Today, conservatives tend to describe Harris with synonyms for “insane.”

The newfound Republican doubts about Harris spring not from a single event, but an accumulation of small, bizarre episodes. She made a speech about a terrorist plot (to blow up a power grid in Indiana) that turned out to be wholly imaginary. She accused newspapers of publishing doctored photographs of her. She has raged against her staff, accusing aides of secretly working for her opponent. Since 2003, while serving as a member of Congress and running for Senate, she has had four chiefs of staff and four press secretaries leave her office. In 2006 alone, more than a dozen staffers have quit. Many of them have described her erratic behavior and irrational tirades to the press.

To those Republicans who are just coming around to the idea that Ms. Harris may not be who they really want as representative of their party in what is overwhelmingly a red state, columnist Jonathan Chait takes an “I told you so” attitude that is classic snarky frat-boy. But he does dig up the real goods on Harris and suggests that if we all agree to accept as fact that she is a first-class nutjob, we can look back at her role in the 2000 presidential election and see that her craziness and incompetence at that time led to her biggest blunder — she appointed George Bush president!

Chait goes on to dissect Harris’ role in the botched recounts that led to Bush taking Florida (emphasis on taking). He didn’t win it, as later investigations showed, but by then Gore had bowed out, either as a gentleman or jerk, depending on your viewpoint, and Harris was credited by her party with loyally handing the “victory” to her boss Jeb Bush’s big bro George.

Harris remained an icon among conservatives until very recently, and the degeneration of her image from wise public servant to nutbag has been abrupt. Most Republicans have chosen to treat her eccentric displays as a sudden and unforeseeable outbreak of delirium–ones that happened to coincide with the moment that she became a strategic liability for the party. After Harris floated unsubstantiated rumors that Joe Scarborough (a former GOP member of Congress whom Harris viewed as a potential primary rival) may have killed one of his interns, Scarborough noted, “That was the first clue that something wasn’t right with Katherine Harris.”

In fact, there were plenty of clues to that effect from the very beginning. One such clue was Harris’s oft-stated belief that she was the modern-day incarnation of the biblical heroine Queen Esther. (”If I perish, I perish,” she would proclaim dramatically, perhaps confusing Esther with Jesus.) During the recount, Harris made this analogy to her staff so frequently that, as the Post reported, her underlings finally begged, “No more Esther stories!”

Or there was the time, during the heat of the recount, when Harris told reporters, “I dreamed that I would ride into this stadium [the site of the Florida/Florida State football game] on a horse, carrying the FSU flag in one hand and the [election] certification in the other–while everyone around me cheered.” Some of us took this statement as another fairly strong clue that Harris was something less than the dispassionate, ultra-professional public servant her supporters made her out to be.

Then Chait gets to the heart of his argument — that as a true conservative, he has been soundly disappointed by George Bush’s performance and feels there should be a groundswell among the true wingnut believers to pillory, not Bush, but Katherine Harris for not just being crazy and incompetent, but for being crazy and incompetent to hand the presidency to a possibly crazier, certainly more incompetent George Bush:

Florida may be the last remaining taboo of the Bush presidency. Conservatives have questioned Bush’s domestic record, his foreign policy, even (in the recent case of Scarborough) his intelligence. None have bothered to reinterpret Florida. But the bedrock assumption of the conservative interpretation of Florida is that Harris is a sober, competent, and upstanding public servant. If you assume that Harris is none of those things, then the whole denouement of 2000–and, by extension, the very legitimacy of Bush’s presidency–takes on a strikingly different cast.

What do you say, conservatives? Now that some of you are willing to contemplate that Bush has been a disappointment–or even a disaster–is it too much to consider the possibility that he never should have become president in the first place?