The stakes in every election...

...from sewer commissioner to POTUS are immeasurably higher than the stakes in any sporting event, but that doesn't mean that sports analogies aren't sometimes useful, and Ezra Klein offers the best one I've seen lately...

We're not going to win by copying the Republican playbook. In football, you spend the week before a game learning the other team's plays. But you don't run them. You learn how to defend against them, and you run the plays you're good at. Because the other team has created a playbook relying on their specific attributes -- their strongest players, their coach's expertise, their linemen's size. If you tried to ape it, you'd simply be running their plays without any of their strengths. You'd lose. And if Democrats keep trying to run Republican plays without building the foundations that made them work, we will lose as well. We've got to make a conscious choice to find our own strengths, create our own image, and utilize attacks that play to our abilities. Otherwise, we're simply codifying Republican tactics as the de facto ground for political warfare, and we might as well give up now.

I encourage you to read the full post, which puts Gannongate in a useful perspective, but the excerpt above is worth repeating...and remembering.