Lessons Unlearned
Give Pat Toomey credit for this:
The declared challenger for the GOP nomination for Arlen Specter's Senate seat is willing to bet a career on a proposition that other conservatives only assert from the safety of the sidelines.
Toomey is betting that Republicans would do better in a blue-leaning state like Pennsylvania if they purged the last remaining moderates from the party. He’s (again) challenging Arlen Spectator - and this time, unlike last, he may well succeed. Just as Ned Lamont succeeded against Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary.
The grand problem that follows, for Toomey as for Lamont, is then: what happens next? In the Connecticut example, Democrats escaped lightly from the Lamont blunder. Instead of delivering the seat to the Republicans, Lieberman ran as an independent Democrat and won, and since then has voted more or less along the Democratic party line. In Pennyslvania, by contrast, the defeat of Specter almost certainly will mean the loss of both Pennsylvania Senates to the Democrats for a generation.
Toomey theorizes that Republicans would do better in Pennsylvania if they were more outspokenly prolife and defiantly opposed to the Obama economic plan. The reality: If nominated, Toomey’s prolife views would cost him what remains of traditional Republican support in the Philadelphia suburbs and his anti-stimulus stance would damage him with working-clsas voters elsewhere in the state.
Penn voters approve the Obama stimulus plan 50-37. They approve of Arlen Specter too, especially Independents and Democrats. And of course President Obama remains popular in the state.
On the other hand, maybe a Toomey nomination and subsequent defeat is just the kind of learning experience Republicans need to undergo. You might think we have had enough hard lessons as it is. But no. I’m reminded of that old 1960s joke about the liberal judge who decalred that the experience of being himself mugged had not changed his lenient views. Punchline: An old lady at the back of the hall shouts, “Mug him again.” That seems to be the GOP’s impending fate as well.