Conservatives to challenge
a dozen GOP candidates
In what could be a nightmare scenario for Republican Party officials, conservative activists are gearing up to challenge leading GOP candidates in more than a dozen key House and Senate races in 2010. Conservatives and tea party activists had already set their sights on some of the GOP’s top Senate recruits. . . But their success in Tuesday’s upstate New York special election, where grass-roots efforts pushed GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava to drop out of the race and helped Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman surge into the lead on the eve of Election Day, has generated more money and enthusiasm than organizers ever imagined.God, I hope Hoffman wins. Not because I like Doug Hoffman. I don't know anything about Doug Hoffman, but if he's got the support of the tea-baggers, I assume he's a nut or a neanderthal.
*No, I hope he wins so that the super-right-wing nutsos might be emboldened to abandon the Republican Party and form their own gun-nut/anti-science/pro-war/pro-Israel (but anti-Jew) party.
I don't see any bad scenario arising from that. At the least, the right gets splintered into two weaker parties.
At best, the split on the right enables progressive Democrats to split off from the DLC "New Democrats." Maybe the next time a seriously progressive candidate like Ralph nader (But not Ralph Nader) the conventional wisdom won't be that you can't vote for him because you'll be handing the election to the Republicans.
Ideally, I would love to see at least a couple different parties on the left, a couple on the right, and a couple in the middle. Wouldn't it be nice to have actual choices in the election booth? Instead of having to "hold your nose and vote for Kerry because at least he isn't Bush." I would love to have to decide between, say, a Green Party candidate, a Labor Party candidate, and a progressive Democrat without worrying about giving an automatic victory to the Right because they're trying to decide whether to vote for the Old Testament Party, the Ghost of Reagan Party and the Shoot 'em All Party.
“I would say it’s the tip of the spear,” said Dick Armey, the former GOP House majority leader who now serves as chairman of FreedomWorks, an organization that has been closely aligned with the tea party movement. “We are the biggest source of energy in American politics today.”
God, that's a depressing thought. especially since he's probably right. The kooks seem to have an inexhaustible energy and certainly no shortage of funding.
“What you’re going to see,” said Armey, “is moderates and conservatives across the country in primaries.” Party strategists worry that well-funded, well-organized challenges from the right could force Republicans to exhaust precious resources on messy primary fights — or force moderate candidates to adopt more strident positions early on that could haunt them during the final months of the campaign.
So how could that be a bad thing?
The next race on which to keep an eye is the Republican Senatorial Primary in Florida. Tea-bagger favorite Marco Rubio is mounting a challenge to the presumptive nominee, Charlie Crist.
Rubio has won nearly a dozen county GOP straw polls across the state and is rapidly becoming a darling of the tea party movement. Everett Wilkinson, an organizer for the Florida Tea Party Patriots, said his group plans to take part in get-out-the-vote activities and other efforts to deny Crist the GOP nomination, despite the fact that Crist leads both Rubio and Rep. Kendrick Meek, the likely Democratic nominee, by a comfortable margin.
*Oh, yeah. Here he is being endorsed by Frankenberry:
