Most of Krauthammer’s column today is tiresome, but he does ask one good question:

Fourth, what sane Democrat wants to nationalize an election at a time of 9.6 percent unemployment and such disappointment with Obama that just this week several of his own dreamy 2008 supporters turned on him at a cozy town hall? The Democrats’ only hope is to run local campaigns on local issues.

That’s true. When I saw Obama attacking Boehner in Ohio, I didn’t think that much of it, since Boehner is from Ohio, but I have been amazed by the stupidity of Democratic attemps to make the election into a contest focused on Tea Partiers. Democratic leaders have become preoccupied with the latest fad in political reporting and they have allowed themselves to confuse a media-inflated phenomenon inside the other party that is of interest mostly to pundits and conservative Republican activists with something that will matter to swing voters. Just as national Republicans have been flailing around hopelessly in special election after special election because they want to make every contest a referendum on Nancy Pelosi, national Democrats are going to sabotage themselves if they try to turn local races into a vote on John Boehner. As with Pelosi since 2007, most people have no idea who Boehner is and he doesn’t matter to them even if they do know. Republicans have routinely failed in House special elections because they wanted the voters in these districts to approve of a national platform for the most loathed of the two major parties.

Obviously, vulnerable Democrats in swing districts are doing everything they can to demonstrate their independence from the national party agenda, and they may be succeeding, but it hardly helps them to have their national leaders giving the election a unifying theme. Focusing on Tea Partiers is based in a misreading of the political scene as bad as the one many Republicans are making. If many Republicans mistakenly believe that the midterms represent a general revolt against a “big government agenda,” it seems that many national Democrats assume that the public shares their visceral dislike of Tea Partiers, but for the most part Americans either don’t know or don’t care about Tea Partiers.

There is the possibility that national Democrats think that their core constituencies will be so horrified by Tea Partiers that this will motivate them to vote when they otherwise wouldn’t, but they are essentially relying on mobilizing their low-information voters with a message that only their high-information voters would find meaningful. Go to a dinner party here in Hyde Park, and people will casually make jokes about Christine O’Donnell and everyone will understand the reference and have more or less the same reaction, but despite the media frenzy around O’Donnell it is doubtful that large numbers of voters who belonged to the Obama coalition have more than a vague idea of who she is and what she represents. The same goes for the Tea Party in general. National Democrats must be so completely trapped inside the bubble of political commentary and national news reporting to think that railing against the Tea Party is going to mean anything to most of the voters they’re trying to mobilize or to win over to their side.