Fun fun fun from Tapper, who’s got a must-see highlight reel of the best spots. If you don’t have time to watch them all, at least check out Bobby Bright’s spot. Good lord — the man makes Dale Peterson look like a communist. Just switch parties already.

How far is Team Democrat willing to go to “re-brand” after 19 ruinous months of Hopenchange, with a near-majority of likely voters now calling Obama’s views “extreme”? A possible leading indicator:

Mr. Blumenauer, a seven-term congressman from Portland, Ore., is nobody’s idea of a centrist. Bow-tied and erudite in the manner of a prep school headmaster, he is known mostly as a champion of bicycle paths and light rail. (He bikes his way around both Washington and Portland and formed the Bicycle Caucus in the House.) The liberal League of Conservation Voters most recently gave him a perfect 100 rating, while the conservative National Taxpayers Union gave him an “F.”…

Mr. Blumenauer doesn’t argue that government does too much, or that programs like Social Security and Medicare aren’t vital. Rather, in two recent conversations about the nation’s finances, Mr. Blumenauer argued that if Democrats really want to protect a vast array of federal programs from repeated Republican onslaughts, then they need to bring the costs of the programs in line with reality.

Otherwise, he said, liberals only make it easier for conservative critics of social spending to undermine the entire premise of liberal government. And they make it that much harder to propose new and much-needed investments in, say, infrastructure and education.

In fairness, that’s less a case of re-branding than some strategic thinking about how best to preserve the welfare state, but both this and the ads are motivated by the same thing — fear of a giant red wave in November. In fact, guess which tea-party radical in Colorado said the following at a town hall earlier this week, amid other comments about how we need to rein in public-sector salaries: “We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet [and] in my view we have nothing to show for it.” Ken Buck, you say? Not quite.

Rather than devote free space to an ad from some phony conservative Blue Dog, I’ll leave you with the first spot of the season from our man in Florida.