JIM GERAGHTY: Democrats, It’s Time to Recognize That Your Kavanaugh Playbook Didn’t Work.

With Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia saying they will vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, it appears the confirmation battle is almost over. (Then again, all it would take to suddenly change the calculus would be two Republican senators going wobbly.)

I doubt Democrats want to take any advice at this moment, particularly from someone like me, but hopefully sometime soon, they’ll have a reckoning that their tactics in this fight did not work.

The protesters constantly interrupting the hearing did not work.

Going over Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbooks as if they were something from The Da Vinci Code and trying to ascribe some sinister meanings to teenage slang such as “boof” and “Devil’s Triangle” did not work.

Trying to make Kavanaugh sound like the Bluto Blutarsky of Yale University did not work.

Suggesting that Kavanaugh is some sort of threat to girls on basketball teams did not work.

Portraying his daughter praying for forgiveness for her father in an editorial cartoon did not work.

This stuff didn’t work with Clarence Thomas either, but what else have they got?