With Opponents Like These . . .

Former Republican senator Mel Martinez of Florida has admitted recently that he would prefer that the Republicans don't win back the Senate this year because, whereas the GOP is expected to take over the House, they would only share blame with the Democrats for an economy that's unlikely to get better any time soon if the Democrats were to keep control of the Senate. If they win everything, Martinez argued, the Republicans would be held accountable for everything. Perhaps that's why Republicans who are in a good position to win key Senate races are either saying stupid things or allowing stupid things they've done to resurface, thus blowing their chances.

Cases in point: West Virginia and Colorado. With a possible victory in his grasp in his bid to win the late Robert Byrd's Senate seat, West Virginia Republican candidate John Raese, vying to become the first Republican senator elected from the Mountain State since the fifties, told ABC News that the minimum wage is an archaic form of government control of the free market and should be abolished.

Joe Manchin, the Democratic governor of West Virginia opposing Raese in the special Senate election, has been given a wonderful gift in this culturally conservative but highly unionized state. Many West Virginia voters have been encouraged to vote for Raese and keep Manchin as governor rather than give President Obama - deeply unpopular in the Mountain State - another vote for his economic agenda. Now they just might want that vote to preserve their jobs and federally guaranteed wages. Rease - who is legally a West Virginia resident but spends much of his time in Florida - is so out of touch he boasts how he made his money the old fashioned way by inheriting it. Well, the wealthy steel and limestone tycoon clearly didn't earn it like Smith Barney. (If the name sounds familiar to some West Virginians, it may be because he ran against Jay Rockefeller for the state's other Senate seat in 1984 but lost to Rockefeller - then the state's governor - despite Ronald Reagan's re-election landslide that year.)

Meanwhile, appointed Democratic senator Michael Bennet in Colorado is fighting for a term in his own right and his political life against Tea Party Republican Ken Buck, and has been slipping badly, but a chapter in Buck's past has come back to haunt him. It appears that when he was the district attorney for Weld County in 2005, Buck refused to look into an allegation of rape because the woman who made the claim did not have proof beyond a reasonable doubt He could have stopped there, but the woman, it turns out, secretly taped a meeting with Buck in which he explained another reason for not pursuing the case. "It appears to me," Buck said, "that you invited him over to have sex with him."

This is redolent of Jeremiah Denton, the one-term Republican senator from Alabama in the 1980s, who objected to prosecuting a man accused of raping his wife because when women get married, they have to expect they're going to get a little sex. In fact, it's just plain redolent. Buck is known for his misogynistic attitude; he once said he'd make a better candidate than his female competitor for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination because he didn't "wear high heels."

Buck leads Bennet by five points overall but trails badly among women. I understand that Michelle Obama is going to campaign for Democrats to help get out the women's vote. She should go to Colorado. She doesn't even have to mention the rape controversy. She just has to go there.