From DailyKos quoting Greg Sargent.Blanche Lincoln's victory will be widely painted as a crushing loss for the left. Labor poured a huge amount of cash into the race, and there's no quibbling with the fact that this is a disappointing defeat.
But make no mistake: Progressive activists and labor mounted a challenge that was barely months in the making, and rallying behind Bill Halter, came within a hair of unseating a longtime incumbent who had the backing of the entire Dem establishment and the two most recent Dem presidents.
No matter what you read about this, the Halter challenge was a show of force by the left. Period. If you don't belive that, ask yourself why Lincoln suddenly found herself backing a tough-on-derivatives proposal in the Senate, why Obama had to cut radio ads and robocalls to save Lincoln, and why Bill Clinton had to come into the state to instruct voters not to listen to unions in order to save Lincoln's hide.
It remains to be seen who on the left will lift a finger to help Lincoln from here on out. More on this tomorrow, but for now, it's clear that the Dem establishment threw its weight behind a candidate who polls show is less likely to win the general election -- and Dems may have just lost themselves a Senate seat.
I admit that not defeating Blanche Lincoln was a tough loss for we progressives, but as the quote above aptly states, it took the entire Democratic machine in Washington to head off we netroots, and she was fighting for her life -- an incumbent being challenged by someone hardly known, and who forced her to change a few stances, and brought out both Obama AND Billy boy.
This doesn't change the fact that if the Democrats in Congress don't start acting in the fashion that they were elected to act, they will continue to face uphill battles for seats they have, in the past, thought were rightfully theirs.
Peace, out.
5 comments:
Like it or not, last night's big winner was Sarah Palin. Almost every candidate she endorsed won their primary. Not too bad, now let's see what the general election brings.
I will have to get back to you on whether or not that's a valid statement, Tony. I need to research all of her endorsements thus far have won their races.
Regardless, Palin is a blithering idiot who, in some ways, makes me like Bush better. And that says an awful lot.
Now there you go changing my words, again. I did not say all of her endorsements, I said ALMOST EVERY CANDIDATE SHE ENDORSED WON. There is a difference. She is 5 out of 9 for congress and ALL of her picks for governor won, except Haley, who will win in the run off election. It must really bother the elite that a "blithering idiot" can run circles around them.
Ha ha ha ha. I doubt she's running circles around anyone except herself, Tony. And I see you are backtracking as usual. But, then again, you have admitted you are a tea bagger (oh, I am sorry, you said you would prefer, when talking about you, that I use the term tea party - my bad), so you are probably peeing in your pants right now!
We can table this until the general elections, and also see how things pan out vis-a-vis teabagger endorsements and liberal progressive endorsements in 2012! We may not have persevered with Halter, but hey, we smacked Specter (and the White House) around in PA, and we're not going away. So, will it be the "angry" left or the "angry" right that pulls the rabbit out of the hat?
I'm not backtracking, read my first post, it is very clear. Yes we will see how the 2010 general elections pan out then onto the 2012 campaign. I, of course, believe the right will defeat the left soundly. Time will tell.
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