Yup. There’s lot of Americans who haven’t gotten the memo that there’s no such thing as a pro-life Democrat. Or maybe they got the memo but they’re just not reading it.

Jim Geraghty writes:

Critz ran as a conservative: Some conservatives bitterly chuckled that Democrats were celebrating the victory of a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat who opposed health care and cap-and-trade. (Public Policy Polling found only 30 percent of the district’s voters support Obamacare, and 58 percent oppose.) This comes on the heels of an anti-Obamacare, anti-Pelosi, pro-life Democrat, Mike Oliverio, knocking off incumbent Alan Mollohan in West Virginia. They contend that few Democrats will be able to run on as conservative a platform as Critz and Oliverio did.

That argument is true enough, but a lot of Democrats who are considered vulnerable will be attempting to run as conservatives this fall. In fact, what made Pennsylvania’s special House election a useful indicator was that the two candidates offered precisely the arguments we should see in many swing districts this fall: the Republican arguing that the Democrat was a puppet for President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrat insisting that no, he had nothing to do with those Washington liberals, that he was just a homespun country boy who voted in his district’s best interest. Tuesday, a district full of conservative Democrats concluded that Critz made the more persuasive argument.

So the point is that Democrats can still pretend to be pro-life and many voters will buy it. That’s the lesson of PA-12.

This race was watched closely by Democrats. They will seek to model many candidacies across the country on this (as they have done in the past.) Of course, they’ve done this in the past but I actually believed that we all watched the blowing up of the myth of the Blue Dog Democrat during the Obamacare debacle. Unfortunately, that is not so.

We have not yet learned.