Powerline’s John Hinderaker calls this one reason to hope that Democrats suffer a humiliating defeat this November — and a more important one than one might at first think. The question here is why it took this long to get this kind of analysis. Has Hardball and its guests been consistently skeptical about the War On Koch? Here’s Howard Fineman of the Huffington Post on Monday night:

“I think for all of his social media savvy in the campaigns, they’ve dropped the ball in terms of really pushing this message out to targeted voters,” Fineman said told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Hardball. “I also see them wasting a lot of time running against the Koch brothers.”

Fineman tore apart the Obama administration’s approach to supporting Democratic candidates in the midterm elections and joined MSNBC host Joe Scarborough in criticizing the Democratic Party’s ineffective and counterproductive obsession with the Koch brothers.

“I’m sorry, at least to me, campaigning against the Koch brothers is idiotic, because the Koch brothers aren’t on the ballot,” Fineman said.

The clip doesn’t catch much of Chris Matthews’ reaction, but Hardball has been one of the venues making the War On Koch argument. A year ago, when Harry Reid’s strategy had become clear, Matthews ripped an AFP official for taking cash from the Koch brothers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPKJUeh14_A

And here’s Matthews again six months ago, claiming that a man who has managed to run a global corporation and make billions of dollars is actually illiterate:

Now, suddenly, Hardball has reached the conclusion that a national political strategy based on attacking the Koch brothers is “idiotic.” They apparently learned that by experience — and they’re correct. Maybe they should send a memo to Harry Reid.

Never mind the memo, John Hinderaker writes — the voters will probably deliver the message more forcefully, and we’d better hope they do:

If the Democrats get clobbered in November, their anti-Koch strategy will go down as a failure, and parties in the future will be unlikely to repeat it. If, on the other hand, the Democrats outperform expectations, they likely will conclude that their diversionary attack on the Kochs worked, and they are likely to try the same thing in the future, against the Kochs or others who disagree with them. Our politics are plenty dirty enough without giving the Democrats that sort of encouragement.

If they do go down to flaming defeat, Senate Democrats and the party in general will be forced to reckon with their demagoguery. I wonder if the same will be true of MSNBC and Hardball.