I suppose the White House will take narratives like this, even if they are terribly misleading.
The headline victory belonged to Sen. Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat who, with extensive help from Obama and the party establishment in Washington, galloped to a surprisingly wide 9-point victory over challenger Andrew Romanoff. A former state House speaker, Romanoff once looked well-positioned to rally liberal discontent and give the White House a very visible black eye.
Romanoff ran to Bennet’s left in a Democratic primary, but he’s actually a DLC wunderkind in the mold of Harold Ford and Tom Carper. There were two Establishment candidates on the ballot in Colorado last night. There was no way for the Establishment to lose. Nevertheless, the matchup involved one candidate who endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 and received Bill Clinton’s endorsement in return, and one candidate who was endorsed by the president and received significant assistance from the Democratic Party. Once again, Team Obama prevailed.
This isn’t much of a statement about ideology, but it helps the president maintain influence over members of Congress by establishing that his blessing can be helpful to their electoral prospects. It would be a bad mistake to see this result as a defeat for progressives or a victory for moderates. Colorado is a still a conservative place with a lot of conservative Democrats. Michael Bennet is an improvement over the person he replaced, now Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. But we shouldn’t expect him, or his partner Sen. Mark Udall, to vote like progressives. Bennet, if reelected, will compile a voting record that puts him the centrist third of the caucus. Romanoff would have done no different.
The bigger story out of Colorado is the potentially disastrous results in the Republican primaries for both governor and senate.
The Senate race saw the RNSC candidate go down in flames.
The Colorado results, combined with Tuesday’s returns in Connecticut, Georgia and Minnesota, and other recent primaries, suggest it may be time to scrutinize a treasured 2010 storyline — about an angry electorate, determined to punish insiders and professional pols of all stripes, rushing to embrace ideological insurgents.
It’s not that this narrative is all wrong. But it appears to be significantly more true among Republicans than Democrats.
[Tea Party-backed insurgent, Ken] Buck, for instance, was favored by some tea party activists but opposed by much of the state and national party leadership. Buck’s caught-on-tape remark that he ought to be elected because he didn’t wear high heels wasn’t enough for Lt. Gov Jane Norton to close the gap in their primary, but it will certainly be used against the Republican nominee in the general election.
But the governor’s race result was even more pathetic.
Republicans also didn’t do themselves any favors in Colorado’s gubernatorial contest by narrowly nominating Dan Maes. GOP leaders had hoped former Rep. Scott McInnis, who has become embroiled in a plagiarism scandal, would win the nomination and then agree to drop out — allowing the party to tap a new nominee who would give them a better chance against former Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.
But Maes is unlikely to quit, and his recent suggestion that a Denver bicycle-sharing program may “threaten our personal freedoms” and lead to greater U.N. influence has only amplified Republican fears about the contest.
As an outside observer, I have the feeling that Colorado is in a bad mood and that the pendulum is swinging to the right. But, once again, the Republicans have jeopardized their chances by nominating very unstable candidates.
In Georgia, there will probably be an automatic recount in the governor’s race, but Nathan Deal, who has a modest lead, is involved in a grand jury investigation and was the subject of an ethics complaint in Congress before he resigned to run his gubernatorial campaign. He will have a cloud hanging over him for the duration of this campaign.
And then there is Connecticut:
On Tuesday night, the Democratic National Committee released a statement reading, “Today the party of Bob Dole, Jack Kemp and Dick Lugar nominated a candidate who kicks men in the crotch, thinks of scenes of necrophilia as ‘entertainment,’ and runs an operation where women are forced to bark like dogs. This is what has become of the once grand old party.”
The Republicans could have offered responsible alternatives, but they’ve given us crooks, cranks, and kooks. I’ll count that as a good thing only if they all lose in November.
