When we find ourselves in the presence of the doom-and-gloom “they’ll never beat Mary Landrieu” crowd, we always fall back to the fact that there are so many Landrieu Senate votes of recent vintage which damage her electability and make beating her such an attainable proposition.

Mary’s record on Obamacare is a perfect example.

Her vote was a terrible one. She was the deciding vote which put Obamacare in place, and she bragged about the fact she sold that vote for a temporary bump in the amount of Medicaid money Louisiana received from the federal government, per a long-standing request from the state’s governor Bobby Jindal.

And then she demanded Jindal defend her against charges of political prostitution arising from that “Louisiana Purchase” debacle, as though Jindal’s request for a change in the funding formula – which at the time had been standing for a year or more – was satisfied by appending it to the passage of a bill which would increase its overall state costs by billions of dollars and lead to putting the majority of Louisianans into government dependency with respect to health insurance.

Having emerged beaten and bloody from that fight, Landrieu continues sticking by her Obamacare guns – even as the IRS scandal spilled over the banks and the realization hit many in Louisiana that the Obamacare plan she brought to life by casting the deciding vote in favor of it would put the same agency guilty of persecuting people who disagree with President Obama politically in charge of administering government health insurance. And it just so happens that Landrieu had taken $23,000 in campaign contributions from the union the IRS’ employees are members of, making her one of the National Treasury Employees’ Union’s most favored senators.

It only got worse this week with a pair of idiotic comments she offered up. Naturally, the National Republican Senatorial Committee seized on them to tie everything into a nice, neat little package they deposited onto the web today…

This is the kind of thing which will keep Bill Cassidy, or whoever else ultimately emerges as Landrieu’s main opponent in next year’s election, in the race no matter what happens. It’s the kind of thing which will depress Landrieu’s approval and re-elect numbers. And it’s the kind of thing which will keep her on the rhetorical defensive.

Landrieu has managed to skate by GOP opponents three times since 1996. We just don’t believe, absent a major botch in Cassidy’s campaign, that she’ll skate a fourth time. And that’s why we’re not swayed by the “they can’t beat Landrieu” stuff.