Not That Anyone Will Notice
by digby
Matt Yglesias wonders why this isn’t getting more attention, seeing as the world was widely believed to be spinning off its axis when Democrats did this last year in Connecticut:
In the coming election, moderate and maverick Republicans face mirror-image risks. Because the maverick conservatives tend to represent more solidly Republican areas (like Graham in South Carolina or Hagel in Nebraska), they face relatively less danger of losing to Democrats in a general election next fall. But precisely because they represent conservative regions where demands for ideological purity are more intense, the mavericks are confronting an elevated risk of challenges in party primaries.
Hagel, the most outspoken Republican critic of the war, has already drawn a serious primary opponent (Nebraska Atty. Gen. Jon Bruning) for next year, and Graham and Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens could face challenges in the primaries too — which would make 2008 the first time since 1978 that more than one Republican senator has faced such a challenge. More than half a dozen House Republicans, all of them in Republican-leaning districts, also have attracted primary challengers.
What, no rending of garments among the cognoscenti about how the horrible party purists are destroying the Republican chances of ever appealing to the mainstream? No talk of Stalinist purges and purity oaths? I’m shocked.
Meanwhile, the public seems to have caught on to the uselessness of “moderate” Republicans:
Some moderate Republicans, including Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, also have confronted arduous primaries from conservative challengers in recent years, and Maryland’s Wayne Gilchrest, a leading House centrist, is facing one now. But for most of the remaining GOP moderates, primaries are no longer the principal danger. Instead, because they mostly now represent swing or even Democratic-leaning constituencies, the moderates face a growing danger in their general election campaigns. In 2006, the Republican Party suffered heavy general election losses in the affluent, white-collar suburbs where moderates tend to be located and where they once thrived (especially along the coasts and in the upper Midwest). And “the environment for them in 2008 could be as bad or worse,” said independent election analyst Stuart Rothenberg.
[…]
The upcoming election may further deplete the ranks of both the mavericks and moderates. Bush’s focus on mobilizing the conservative base, while generally helping Republicans in conservative areas, has alienated independent and moderate voters in the suburban districts many moderates GOP officeholders represent.
Golly, that’s odd. It seems like just yesterday I was being lectured to ad nauseum that the base of the Republican Party was Real America and the latte-sipping losers who didn’t see that could just STFU and submit. Now it turns out that it’s the lunatic fringe of the right that has the Republican party spiraling down to a regional minority. How’d that happen?
Last year at this time, the press was apoplectic that the Democrats in Connecticut would even dream of taking on an incumbent Senator even though there had long been similar efforts from the right wing of the Republican party. But, of course, the assumption was that the right wing of the Republican party represented the mainstream, unlike the dirty hippies of Connecticut, and therefore were realigning the nation along its natural wingnut axis. It will be interesting to see if they internalize this or just keep robotically mouthing their comfortable mantra that the real problem in this race is that the Democrats are too far to the left, as Cokie and Gergen did a couple of weeks ago. Maybe if Ron Brownstein writes this piece about thirty more times, they might wake out of their 40 year coma and see that it isn’t 1968 any more — but I doubt it.
But hey, keep hope alive. Maybe someday the press will even catch up to the fact that the radicals of today are these people:
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