Didn't See It Coming, But Not Really Surprised

Jeez, you go to lunch and Arlen Specter changes freakin’ parties. With Toomey polling above fifty percent in a potential Republican primary, this really isn’t that big a surprise. Specter obviously makes much more sense in the Democratic caucus than he did in the Republican one – the most conservative Democrat is way more conservative than the most liberal Republican is.

One of the strangest things about the modern story of the Republican Party is the degree of party loyalty they have been able to engender, and the degree to which its outer fringes hold sway inside the party. The same is just not true for Democrats – look at the degree to which blue dogs like Bayh feel free to go against large, popular legislation with impunity, and the degree that even moderate Republicans like Voinovich, Snowe, Collins and even Specter are forced to toe the line.

Interesting times. At any rate, this should impact EFCA in some interesting ways, so perhaps we'll hear from DP later about that.

Lou Gehrig 2.0

Ted Stevens gives his last address to the Senate here and we can honestly allow our eyes to well at the passing of a true monument: a Senator who could operate with impunity because he gave so much money back to his tiny, tiny state that their oil revenues would fund everything else, including his corruption, and a system of government that would allow a person, no matter how corrupt and how compromised, no matter the party in charge, to remain in power and to continue to direct funds back to their power base. We are, in fact, the luckiest people on the face of the earth.

Gaze Into the Future with Aaron

Bringing the curtain down on the Alaskan Senate race puts the attention back on the Minnesota recount and the Georgia run-off. Martin is unlikely to triumph in the run-off, I think, but you never know, and Franken is going into the recount officially behind by two hundred or so votes. Anything could happen there, but I’m not getting my expectations up. Still, two things worth watching for the next couple of weeks. Realistically, though, I think we can expect the senate to have fifty-six Democrats, fifty-eight with Bernie Saunders and Joe Lieberman. So what about 2010?

It’s impossible to predict what will happen, obviously – too much depends upon President Obama’s performance and how the economy is doing in the lead up to the election. That being said, there are a number of Senators running for reelection who are already over seventy years old: McCain, obviously, but Mikulski, Shelby, Grassley, Bunning, Specter, Bennett and Voinovich are all older than dirt, too, and the election is still two years away.

Since I’m an Ohioan, I’m especially curious about what Voinovich is going to do. Mike DeWine was defeated in 2006 by Sherrod Brown, and Voinovich has long been one of the Republican caucus’s few remaining moderates. If the economy does turn around, he’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place: going against the Republican party line will invite a primary challenge from the right, while not working with Democrats could endanger his chances if Ohio continues it’s progressive turn. Does Voinovich want to be vote number sixty that puts Obama’s Supreme Court picks on the bench? Or does he want to go back to Cleveland with his hat in his hand, explaining why he’s been preventing a popular president from enacting his agenda?

All of that, of course, supposes that Obama still is a popular president in 2010. If I had to guess, I’d say Republican gains are likely. The idea of a sixty plus Democratic majority in the Senate strikes me as tremendously unlikely. We’ll see.

All Good Things ...

Various sources are reporting that convicted felon Ted Stevens has lost his bid for reelection to the US Senate to Democratic challenger Mark Begich. I would like to congratulate the soon-to-be-former Senator for all the services he’s rendered to the country, both in giving us an example in what a Senator should not be like, and his efforts on behalf of American comedy. It’s strange to see him finally going – for a while there, it felt like he was more of a natural resource of schadenfreude than a politician. He will be missed.

C'mon, Baby, Joe Didn't Mean It

Well, the Democrats are going to let Lieberman keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. I can’t say this comes as much of a surprise, although I find it disappointing. I’ve never much cared for Joe Lieberman, and his actions in the campaign this year should have resulted in some sort of substantial punishment from his erstwhile compatriots. Would he really have started voting and caucusing with the Republicans on issues that he had heretofore voted liberally on simply out of spite? That’s hard for me to believe, which makes the Democrats unwillingness to punish him all the more frustrating. See Steve Benen on the case for stripping Lieberman of his chair.

All that being said, I also understand why the Democrats have done it (see Ezra Klein for the case). Having (possibly) sixty caucusing votes is a whole lot different than fifty-nine, especially as conservative Democrats like Max Baucus and moderate conservatives like … uh, the Maine Senate delegation and Arlen Specter are going to be under intense pressure to not be the 60th vote to break a filibuster.

All of that may be true, but it’s unsatisfying and leaves the door open for Lieberman to pull this kind of nonsense whenever he wants. Perhaps, if that’s the case, the Democrats can take action down the road. Let’s just hope that Reid has Lieberman on double super secret probation.

Senate Seats Still Up For Grabs

More bad news for convicted felon and TPBP favorite Ted Stevens. According to Talking Points Memo, it’s looking more and more likely that Stevens will sadly lose his reelection bid to Mark Begich, saving the Senate the trouble of having to kick him out and the nation the nightmare of having Sarah Palin appoint herself to the Senate. Could she do that? It would be mavericky, so who knows.

In other one-vote-can’t-make-a-difference news, the Minnesota Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman is still going into extra innings, despite Coleman’s attempts to get Franken to concede because, well, I’m not sure what Coleman was thinking with that.

The Race in Montana

The Republican candidate for Senate from Montana, Bob Kelleher, is an eighty-five year old man, a perennial candidate for office under the Republican, Democratic and Green parties, believes that the three branches of government should be replaced by a parliamentary system based on England’s, studied to be a Catholic priest before deciding he couldn’t be celibate and he is profiled in a NY Times piece today.

The article also discusses the problems Republicans are having in finding candidates to run in various Senate races, such as against Sen. Frank Lautenberg in New Jersey and Sen. Mark Pryor in Arkansas, who is running unopposed.

I personally don’t wish to see the Republicans pick up any Senate seats this year, but I think it’s interesting the way party systems become so entrenched in local government. Max Baucus has been the Democratic Senator from Montana for thirty years. That’s a long time. The Republican Party in Montana seems to be very unhappy with Kelleher’s primary victory (he’s been barred from speaking at the convention). The article doesn’t discuss how Kelleher was able to win the primary this year, and I’d be interested to hear it. If this guy won, what were the other candidates like?

While the presidential race is stable, with Obama consistently leading McCain by a small margin, down-ticket Republicans are having an extraordinarily bad year of it.