Stalin's Sermon: If you're an asshole, people aren't going to vote for you

One would think it's really not too difficult to grasp - elections are essentially popularity contests. One tries to keep one's less appealing habits under wraps - you know, the sleeping with your secretary, beating your wife, shooting heroin, kicking puppies part of your personality. Basically, try not to be an asshole - or be Bob Dole and make it an art form.

This lesson was lost in the New York blogosphere. Here are some recent postings from The Politicker by this man:

• Now, which one of you will say I'm not the most popular candidate in history?
• You'll be shocked to see me polling around 100%.
• [T]he audiences cheered me like I was a rock star and said I was the best.
• And to the other guy who says I have no assistants, are you saying my campaign was even more impressive b/c I did it all by myself?
• Will the media cover my write-in campaign now that I shattered so many voting records?
• If I hadn't been totally blacklisted by the media, and had been allowed in the debates, I would've CRUSHED Ferrer [...].
• The fact that I beat Giff in the Bronx is the biggest upset in all electoral history and I challenge one of you to prove me wrong.
• You people are so dishonest and childish.

Please note that this braying originates with the gentleman who came in in fifth place in this week's primary, garnering 3.77% of the vote, handily edging out the last place candidate, who had only 1.36% of the vote. I suspect that a good number of the hapless souls who voted for this man - inter alia, he proposed making the subway free - were doing so with the express hope of making him go away. Or at least go back to drawing cartoons, which is what he does for a newspaper that essentially ignored his freak show, er, candidacy.

This is just wrong on so many levels, but it can be neatly summed up: Don't be a complete asshole if you want people to, like, cast a ballot for you.