Memo to Josh Rales, failed U.S. Senate candidate who spent $5.5 million on his campaign and got about 5 percent of the Democratic primary vote:

That's about one percent of the vote for every $1 million. Good work. If I didn't know better -- from your numerous TV commercials -- I would have assumed Josh Rales was a fat-cat who lit cigars with burning $20 bills. When you got it, flaunt it, baby, flaunt it!

How much good could you have done, JR -- may I call you that? -- with $5.5 mil if you were really interested in public service instead of gratifying your own ego? I know drug treatment clinics and after-school programs for children that would have put that money to good use.

I know -- you're a philanthropist already. But you could have been $5.5 million more of one and done a lot more good.

The millionaire-running-for-Senate thing didn't work here. Look what K. Mfume did with a piddling $800,000 -- about 40 percent of the vote.

It may be tempting to underestimate the wisdom of the few voters who actually bothered to exercise their constitutional right, but we're not total dummies.

We know, for instance, that somebody who wakes up one day and says, "I think I'll go on TV and bestow my fabulous wisdom on the huddling masses because I'm rich and I can," isn't going to get too far. Not here, anyway.

If you truly wanted to do good, JR, you could have taken the $5.5 mil and provided scholarships to college students, given bonuses and prizes to good school teachers, or provided more beds for drug treatment in Baltimore, where close to one in 10 citizens is addicted.

$5.5 mil on a Senate campaign that raked in a whopping 4 percent of the vote?

Was this some kind of mid-life crisis, JR?

Next time, just buy a Miata!

Make sure you check out all the reader mail on the previous post on Schaefer.