After Mary Landrieu called out the people of Louisiana and the South for their purported racism and sexism as an explanation for why she and President Obama have such low poll numbers yesterday, a big firestorm has blown up across the country and certainly within the state.

Rob Maness immediately blasted out a press release demanding an apology from Landrieu – but in doing so managed to overreach and step on his own message…

“To quote Sen. Landrieu from last night’s debate ‘now you’ve gone too far!’ Maybe if Sen. Landrieu actually lived in Louisiana, she would know that the reason why she and President Obama are so unpopular is because of the policies they support and the big-government agenda they have imposed on Louisiana’s working families. Quite frankly, Sen. Landrieu owes the people of Louisiana an apology for relegating them to nothing but racists and sexists.

“It’s unfortunate that both of my opponents have used divisive language to play the race-card and get elected. Now is the time for Louisianans to unite to take our country back for all of us – and stop supporting divisive politicians who play us off each other to get re-elected.”

What Maness was talking about with his “both of my opponents have used divisive language” spiel was Cassidy’s comment that Harry Reid runs the Senate like a plantation, which nobody in Louisiana particularly thought was a racist statement even though Maness attacked Cassidy for it. He needed to leave that out of his statement to be more effective, but what he said in the first paragraph was pretty good stuff.

Last night on Megyn Kelly’s show, once they were finally able to raise him on the phone, Cassidy was more on message…

Meanwhile, the Times-Picayune’s James Varney was the one who really dropped the hammer on Landrieu…

Things must be going even worse for the Democrats than the polls suggest. The campaign of incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., for example, has hit rock bottom.

How else to explain her lame attempt to blame her electoral peril on racism and sexism? Modern illiberals are incapable of thinking their record or their ideas could lead to misfortune.

Landrieu has trailed in the polls for weeks now. Indeed, it seems increasingly unlikely she could beat either of her two top Republican challengers head-to-head, although she will almost certainly get the chance against one in a runoff.

Desperate, Landrieu went on NBC News. She allowed that sustained attempts to undermine energy production and thus make things much more expensive for us contributes to President Obama’s unpopularity, which, in turn, dampens her own re-election prospects.

But then that’s the uphill battle she must fight, Landrieu sighed, because in the South blacks and women have had it hard. She declined to explain how she has been elected three times as a senator by such a collection of unwashed knuckle draggers.

UNO has a poll out on the Senate race and a number of other issues – it actually reads a lot like a Democrat push-poll intended to make people feel better about Obamacare. But that poll showed Landrieu with only 21 percent of the white vote, four points less than she managed in the James Carville/Stan Greenberg Democracy Corps survey of white likely voters in the state two weeks ago. And the UNO poll was taken from Oct. 11-24, before Landrieu managed to attack 68 percent of the electorate for having a dim view of a president the whole country generally disapproves of.

It might be that even the UNO numbers are high. Persuadable white voters probably won’t like Mary’s making excuses on their backs less than a week to Election Day.