Larry Sabato, the sage of Virginia, once headlined, not exactly a fundraiser, but more of a donor prospecting event, for a progressive political organization with which I had an affiliation (they occasionally, though not as frequently as I would liked, paid me).

When the subject of the 2008 elections (which hadn’t happened yet – this was still 2007) came up, he dispensed his careful, semi-non-partisan (it wasn’t a non-partisan that he was playing for) wisdom.

At one point, I noted that when I’d met John Edwards, he struck me as being a bit of an a–hole. Larry said, Edwards will never be president. As part of the Kerry-Edwards, not only did he lose his home state, he lost the town where he lived. Not only did he lost the town where he lived, he lost the precinct where Edwards himself voted. His own neighbors didn’t vote for him.

Well, I don’t know how Paul Ryan’s precinct voted, but Ryan not only lost Wisconsin, the Romney-Ryan ticked lost Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, where his family had been prominent, well-respected business people (the family money primarily came from government contracts, mostly building roads) for more than a generation.

Sounds to me like a violation of, let’s call it ‘the Sabato Rule.’