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Well, you can't say that you did not see it coming.
I brought it up a few times as the most likely scenario that would play out in the mid-term elections and, sure enough, the Dems are well on the way to self-destructing. Again.
How can a political Party that advocates so pitilessly for political correctness tolerate any level of dissent within its own ranks?
The ascendancy of the "progressives," roughly equivalent to the Taliban of Islam, insured that there would be a Great Purge before long, and any number of centrists would feel threatened by the wholesale abandonment of moderation.
The euphoria of a victory predicated on an aged opponent's very moderation, a perpetual candidate like Obama that sounds so good and delivers so little, and the malaise of eight years of unrelenting character assassination by a media wholly in the pocket is still no sound base for achieving harmony within.
Organizations like MoveOn.org are stoking the fires for the heretics, while Dems from Red states wonder who will have their back.
This article focuses on U.S. Senate races. The more interesting result will be in the House races. And those are not looking any more favorable to the Party which has finally shown its true colors to the electorate after doing their best to echo Republicans in their campaigns.
The Republicans are going through their own internal discussions, of course. Traditionally, they have muddled through to a consensus that takes years to run its course before inevitably diverting to ruin. This year they are showing themselves to be surprisingly cohesive in the face of overwhelming adversity. The message they will come to is one they have embraced consistently, yet failed to stay steady to - fiscal conservatism, strong national defense and economic opportunity.
It is likely the Republicans will have the message that resonates in 2010, because the Democrats finally got what they wanted - the stage all to themselves.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29821.html
Forecast for Dem primaries: Ugly
By: Alex Isenstadt
POLITICO
November 23, 2009 04:30 AM EST
Republicans aren’t the only ones staring at the unnerving prospect of a 2010 primary season filled with smash-mouth intraparty contests that threaten to distract the party and leave Senate nominees bloodied and cash-depleted.
In a handful of next year’s most competitive Senate races — and for a few of the Democratic Party’s most precariously perched incumbents — discordant Democratic primaries are already taking shape, complicating a midterm election landscape in which the party will be playing defense for the first time in four years.
In some cases, the Democrat-on-Democrat fights are simply about ambition. In others, ideology is at the heart of the conflict. The common denominator is that the intraparty battles stand to divert critical resources and divide the party at an especially inopportune time.
“There are a couple of big [states] that should concern them,” said Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “It may not tear the national party apart, but does it tear the party apart in some states?”
The most closely watched Senate primary is in Pennsylvania, where Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak are slugging it out in unusually personal terms.
Specter has cast Sestak as ineffective and opportunistic, attacking him for his failure to register to vote in Pennsylvania until shortly before launching his 2006 congressional campaign and labeling the two-term congressman as “No Show Joe” — a reference to the House votes Sestak has missed while pursuing the Senate nomination.
Not to be outdone, Sestak has assailed the party-switching incumbent’s character, referring to Specter as a “flight risk” for Democrats and reminding the party rank and file of Specter’s decades-long career as a Republican. Last month, Sestak launched a website dedicated to “The Real Arlen Specter,” featuring quotes Specter would rather forget and past tributes to the five-term incumbent from a cast of GOP heavies including President George W. Bush, Sen. Rick Santorum, Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush adviser Karl Rove.
While Democrats are buoyed by polling that suggests either candidate would run competitively against presumptive Republican nominee Pat Toomey, Republicans are nevertheless enjoying the show, applauding Sestak’s attacks on Specter’s left flank in the hopes that both will be drawn further leftward in the battle to win over the Democratic base of activists.
“It’s going to be beyond ugly,” said Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin and Marshall College poll, speaking to the tone of the May primary. “I think it’s going to be at a level that’s virtually unprecedented.”
In that sense, Pennsylvania’s vitriolic Democratic contest resembles the one in Kentucky, where Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo and state Attorney General Jack Conway have been at each other’s throats for months.
In just the past week alone, Mongiardo accused Conway of selling out coal-dependent Kentucky by investing millions of dollars in a Texas energy company “that favors natural gas over developing Kentucky coal” and for failing to disclose his purchases of stock in the firm.
Conway has called the charges “flat-out false” and responded by accusing Mongiardo of having his own natural gas investments. Last week, Conway put out a news release asking, “If Steve Beshear Can’t Trust Dan Mongiardo, Why Should Kentucky Voters?” — a riff on Mongiardo’s well-known tension with the state’s Democratic governor.
Conway has also questioned the lieutenant governor’s ethics, tagging his foe “Double-Dip Dan.”
“Is Dr. Dan hiding his income, cheating on his taxes, overbilling the Kentucky Medicaid Program, lying on his federal and state disclosures or all of the above?” reads another press release, referring to Mongiardo’s medical practice.
“The fight’s gotten pretty nasty,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. “They’re getting pretty nasty pretty early.”
While contested primaries can sometimes prove beneficial, enabling
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