By Dave Anderson:
Last night, I grabbed a couple of beers with a buddy of mine who is also a political blogger. By about the third beer, we had talked about counter-gravity coconuts, Hines Ward leveling a rookie safety and how that relates to single neural net activation, and then NY-23.
NY-23 is the special election in upstate New York that is turning into a circus. The Republicans were smart and nominated a moderate with strong roots to the area and a proven history of being able to win. The Democrats nominated a future Blue-Dog and the conservative grassroots are rallying around a hard-core conservative Teabagger. And at this point the Teabaggers and the Establishment Republicans are splitting the naturally right of center majority of the district so the Democrat has a better than even chance of winning in two weeks. Besides the entertainment of seeing Gingrich piss on Armey and the Weekly Standard go after Republicans, this is the most obvious example of the Republican coalition looking to find someone else in the chump seat.
What is the chump seat? Easy as defined by Tim at Balloon-Juice:
�chump seat� to describe the members of a political coalition whose perceived importance contrasts most sharply with how much influence they actually have. Republicans traditionally kept this seat warm for the religious right, but at least since Schiavo that isn�t true any more.
The Republicans are engaged in a systemic search for the last coalition partner standing to win the chump seat. We are seeing it in races that should be gimmes for Republican candidates, and we are seeing it in extremely competitive races as well.
Right now there are at least six Senate primaries where the goal is to determine who sits in the Republican chump seat. The GOP establishment recruited top tier Senate candidates who have plausible chances to win in New Hampshire and Connecicutt. However former Rep. Simmons (R-CT), the establishment choice is embracing tea-baggerism and Mellon liquidationism to protect his right flank from a Paul-ite primary challenger. The Kentucky GOP Senate primary is between the establishment choice and another Paul-ite primary challenger who is gaining ground and resources. And the mother of all chump seat challenges for the Republicans is in the Florida Senate Primary. The basic question is whether or not the tea-baggers, the doorknockers and the activists will be in the chump seat to the donor class of the Republican Party.And this fight is not just limited to Republicans, although it is more entertaining there. The Democrats are having the chump seat music playing as well for the first time in decades as the damm dirty fucking hippies don't want to be punched for being right. And there is actually institutional support for that fight.
Nancy Pelosi seems to be the biggest player at the elected level who is willing to change chumps in the coalition as she is daring the Blue Dogs to actually examine policy consequences for the first time in years instead of sound bite and punch the hippies consequences:>
It helps, too, that CBO has apparently determined the strong public option -- which would pay at rates pegged to five percent above Medicare -- could save somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion. Given what happened during the stimulus debate, when centrists in the Senate successfully pushed to scale back the bill, it'd be foolish of Pelosi not to anticipate that move.
What's more, this way Pelosi can force the Blue Dogs, many of whom oppose the public option, to confront the trade-offs as they exist. If they don't want the public option, she can say, how else will they find the money the public option might save
The music is playing and we don't quite know when it will stop, but the chumps of at least one party is on the move.
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