Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

It may well be a symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but whenever I start focusing on Bob Casey, a paragraph from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 winds up in block quotes on this site. Here goes.

How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

Switch out the name Nixon for Santorum and that paragraph pretty much sums up the way a lot of Pennsylvania Democrats are feeling right now. In the case of this year’s Pennsylvania Senate race, the dull grey reality of real and moral defeat is even worse than the one Thompson described.

This should have been easy. This should have been fun. Instead, the powers that be within the Democratic Partly chose, without our input, a candidate who makes beating Rick Santorum very hard. Now it’s up to us to fix it. Regardless of the conventional wisdom, we do have a choice. Let’ make a good one.

Forget the sage advise offered by bloggers in California. Forget the sage advice from hacks who don’t get that the whole “Alabama in the middle” business insults a few million more people than it enlightens. Forget the idea that Bob Casey’s positions on a few dozen issues will enable him to pick up the votes of people who will never vote for a Democrat. Forget the idea that people who would love nothing better than to see Rick Santorum out of the U.S. senate, will hold their nose and vote for Bob Casey’s lesser evil. Forget the notion that Bob Casey can beat Rick Santorum. He can’t.

Here’s something Chuck Pennacchio (the candidate I support) wrote about winning Pennsylvania and losing it.

In 2000, the Democrats settled on moderate, anti-choice Ron Klink as their candidate to take on Santorum. This aligned very well with the (still-prevailing) conventional wisdom that the Democrats had to move to the center to win a statewide race in Pennsylvania. Ron Klink had slight success at gaining moderate voters in Central PA; however, this was more than offset by the large number of pro-choice voters who did not cast a vote (over half a million more votes were cast in the presidential election than in the Senatorial election), and just as importantly, did not involve themselves in the Klink campaign. Pro-choice women, a major organizational and financial cog of the Democratic party, sat out the race, and the Democrats allowed a radical right-winger to represent them in Washington.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 1:12 am and is filed under General, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.