Yep. Wisconsin State Senator Dan Kapanke said that. It was a meeting with other Republicans, discussing the recall votes. The key quote:

We’ve got tons of government workers in my district – tons. … We have to overcome that. We gotta hope that they, kind of, are sleeping on July 12th – or whenever the (election) date is.

First question: if his district has so many government workers–if that’s who he represents, if those people are the ones he is supposed to be working for and fighting for–exactly why did he decide to screw them over with the union vote? I mean, I think that’s why his kind of job is called being a “representative” of the people, instead of, say, “party hack.”

If he’s screwed because he did something that hurt most of his constituents, then he absolutely deserves to be recalled. What the hell was he thinking?

Worse, he now actually has the cajones to say that he hopes the voters “kind of are sleeping” on election day. Whenever that is.

How did his campaign manager try to explain that comment off? According to her, (a) “some” of the people Kapanke was speaking to were “government workers,” and (b) he was just trying to encourage supporters to come out to vote.

Really. She said that.

First, the meeting was amongst Republicans at a country club. Something tells me there weren’t too many elementary school teachers in attendance. If there were “government workers” there, they were probably fellow party officials.

Second, trying to pass off “I hope my constituents are sleeping on election day” as “encouraging his supporters to come out to vote” is about as asinine an explanation as I can imagine. The campaign manager might as well have said that the senator was just trying to say that he hoped his constituents were idiots and could not tell the difference.

This is the quality of Republicans today: committed only to the party line, contemptuous of pretty much everything else.