I suppose the White House will take narratives like this, even if they are terribly misleading.
The headline victory belonged to Sen. Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat who, with extensive help from Obama and the party establishment in Washington, galloped to a surprisingly wide 9-point victory over challenger Andrew Romanoff. A former state House speaker, Romanoff once looked well-positioned to rally liberal discontent and give the White House a very visible black eye.
Romanoff ran to Bennet’s left in a Democratic primary, but he’s actually a DLC wunderkind in the mold of Harold Ford and Tom Carper. There were two Establishment candidates on the ballot in Colorado last night. There was no way for the Establishment to lose. Nevertheless, the matchup involved one candidate who endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 and received Bill Clinton’s endorsement in return, and one candidate who was endorsed by the president and received significant assistance from the Democratic Party. Once again, Team Obama prevailed.
This isn’t much of a statement about ideology, but it helps the president maintain influence over members of Congress by establishing that his blessing can be helpful to their electoral prospects. It would be a bad mistake to see this result as a defeat for progressives or a victory for moderates. Colorado is a still a conservative place with a lot of conservative Democrats. Michael Bennet is an improvement over the person he replaced, now Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. But we shouldn’t expect him, or his partner Sen. Mark Udall, to vote like progressives. Bennet, if reelected, will compile a voting record that puts him the centrist third of the caucus. Romanoff would have done no different.
The bigger story out of Colorado is the potentially disastrous results in the Republican primaries for both governor and senate.
The Senate race saw the RNSC candidate go down in flames.
The Colorado results, combined with Tuesday’s returns in Connecticut, Georgia and Minnesota, and other recent primaries, suggest it may be time to scrutinize a treasured 2010 storyline — about an angry electorate, determined to punish insiders and professional pols of all stripes, rushing to embrace ideological insurgents.
It’s not that this narrative is all wrong. But it appears to be significantly more true among Republicans than Democrats.
[Tea Party-backed insurgent, Ken] Buck, for instance, was favored by some tea party activists but opposed by much of the state and national party leadership. Buck’s caught-on-tape remark that he ought to be elected because he didn’t wear high heels wasn’t enough for Lt. Gov Jane Norton to close the gap in their primary, but it will certainly be used against the Republican nominee in the general election.
But the governor’s race result was even more pathetic.
Republicans also didn’t do themselves any favors in Colorado’s gubernatorial contest by narrowly nominating Dan Maes. GOP leaders had hoped former Rep. Scott McInnis, who has become embroiled in a plagiarism scandal, would win the nomination and then agree to drop out — allowing the party to tap a new nominee who would give them a better chance against former Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.
But Maes is unlikely to quit, and his recent suggestion that a Denver bicycle-sharing program may “threaten our personal freedoms” and lead to greater U.N. influence has only amplified Republican fears about the contest.
As an outside observer, I have the feeling that Colorado is in a bad mood and that the pendulum is swinging to the right. But, once again, the Republicans have jeopardized their chances by nominating very unstable candidates.
In Georgia, there will probably be an automatic recount in the governor’s race, but Nathan Deal, who has a modest lead, is involved in a grand jury investigation and was the subject of an ethics complaint in Congress before he resigned to run his gubernatorial campaign. He will have a cloud hanging over him for the duration of this campaign.
And then there is Connecticut:
On Tuesday night, the Democratic National Committee released a statement reading, “Today the party of Bob Dole, Jack Kemp and Dick Lugar nominated a candidate who kicks men in the crotch, thinks of scenes of necrophilia as ‘entertainment,’ and runs an operation where women are forced to bark like dogs. This is what has become of the once grand old party.”
The Republicans could have offered responsible alternatives, but they’ve given us crooks, cranks, and kooks. I’ll count that as a good thing only if they all lose in November.
Mark Kirk is turning into a kook, too.
There’s something the matter with him. Maybe because he inherited the seat from a genuinely liberal Republican and now doesn’t know how to negotiate the GOP’s tumble to insanity. He never seemed driven by principle, and has a history of saying off-the-wall non sequiturs like worrying that Chicago would be targeted by terrorists if prisoners were moved to a prison 130 mile away. Or advising the Chinese to disinvest in American securities.
Now he seems to be escalating. Unless Gianoulias falls under the spell of some idiot “advisor”, he should be able to mop up the floor with him once the campaign becomes top-line news. I think the GOP miscalculated in nominating a candidate who can’t really take advantage of downstate hostility to metro Chicago. They don’t have a horse in this race, so turnout might be low. It will be interesting to see how the burbs take to Kirk — flakiness might be a big turnoff there.
Harry Reid is shrill:
Boo:
You do realize that Obama was a DLC wunderkind too, and that he was never completely erased from the myriad websites the DLC runs, right? See this:
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=251658&kaid=104&subid=210
Give it a rest, Calvin, you’re desperate:
As you know, talk is cheap. Actions count a lot more than words. So why not answer? And if he asked to have his name removed, why is it still there? I didn’t get that link from the wayback machine. And if he believes in single-payer, why is his press secretary dissing those that do?
If you are going to persist in misreading the plain text of what’s on your screen, what am I to do about it? Universal does not equal single-payer. And he said he was asking the DLC to take his name off their directory.
But he’s not disassociating himself from them, is he? If that web page is still up. It just means that he won’t be listed on the front page.
Like I said, you can’t read. In the letter he wrote to Black Commentator, he said a couple of things related to that specific link of yours and on disassociating himself from the DLC. Here they are:
He then said he was instructing the DLC to take them off the register because:
Then he directly addressed the issue of disassociation:
There you go. Obama has not changed. If you listen, you can understand him.
Read twice before responding.
I did read it, and they didn’t take him off. I can read the first time, so obviously there is a disconnect between him and the DLC. However, considering the people the types of people(like Rahm, Salazar and Summers) that populate the positions of importance in his administration, I don’t think there is a disconnect at all. He knows the DLC is toxic to a lot of Democrats and is just playing games. You can complain all you want about Jane Hamsher and whomever else, but I haven’t seen you refute the main points of contention(things like HAMP).
Once again, Team Obama prevailed.
What is your point of this other then poking a stick in the eyes of Romanoff supporters(and aimed at Sirota I am sure, specifically)? Try as you might to spin it, they don’t win every battle(see Snarlin’ Arlen Specter).
Everyone in Colorado is in a bad mood, except, I suppose Bennet and his supporters. But there is a lot of anger and frustration in the state being expressed in all sorts of ways.
I don’t know the current numbers, but people in Colorado are not as highly partisan as I’ve found in other states where I’ve lived, and a huge number proudly register as independents. Perhaps a quarter or even a third of eligible voters are independent. They are not independent because they cannot make up their minds or are uninformed. The ones I know have a deep seated antagonism towards organized parties, something I can sympathize with, being an issues person rather than a party person.
At our caucuses in early 2008, we had people close to tears as they told how they had registered Democratic, against all their long held principles of not being associated with a formal party, just to vote for Obama at the caucus. These are the people we really have to worry about right now. And I also feel pretty strongly that the discontent within the Democratic Party that I am seeing in my own county isn’t going to evaporate by November. People will likely vote Democratic, but I don’t see them donating or calling or pounding doors. Could be wrong, but that’s what I see and hear.
Well, the Republican nominees are a true gift to Colorado Democrats. That’s for sure.
We’ll see. I am not convinced of that.
Not sure either. I keep seeing this view stated in the blogosphere about how, when push comes to shove, that the people who typically vote Democratic will come into the fold and show up to vote in November and support the Democrat, regardless of the candidate.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s true. Why wouldn’t Republicans do the same thing, whether or not the candidate was a raving lunatic? Primary day might well have “been a good night for the Dems” as BooMan has said, but I can’t see that the fact the GOP is picking Tea Party fringers should or could mean that Republican or Republican leaning voters will necessarily stay away in the fall or be at all scared by the insanity of their party. It might seem insane to Democrats that anyone with a modicum of good sense would vote for someone like Sharron Angle, but you can bet your ass they probably will.
And if they don’t? Remember Germany 1932? A kook as crazy as Sarah Palin came to power following that election.