A mixed bag for moderates
By Sean Aqui | Related entries in NewsYesterday’s primaries were a mixed bag for moderates.
In the most closely watched race Sen. Lincoln Chafee defeated a conservative challenger backed by the Club for Growth, guaranteeing that a moderate will be elected no matter who wins in November.
But in Arizona, conservative Randy Graf won the primary battle to replace retiring moderate Republican Jim Kolbe, defeating moderate Steve Huffman, who was endorsed by Kolbe and backed by national Republicans. Graf will face Democrat Gabrielle Gifford in November. This could mean the seat could go Democrat, which is good in the sense that the GOP deserves to lose a lot of seats this year. But I don’t know enough about Gifford’s politics to say whether electing her would be a good thing for moderates.
In Vermont, the House’s lone independent, Bernie Sanders, is trying to become the Senate’s lone independent to replace Jim Jeffords, the Senate’s current lone independent. I note this for the “independent” angle; Sanders, whose views are rather socialist, is not exactly a moderate.
You’ll note one thing about all these races: they are defensive ones, attempting to keep a moderate seat moderate. Such battles are necessary, but we’re not going to elect more moderates until we get off the defensive and start putting gerrymandered “safe seats” into contention.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 and is filed under News. 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.
September 13th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
I deleted Brian in MA’s comment because he’s banned from posting comments. My policy regarding Brian is if somebody has an exchange with him, I’ll leave the comment. However, if nobody has posted any response, I’m going to delete it.
But once again Brian, and yes I still mean it, please go away. If you continue, I’ll contact your university. I’m literally one comment away from doing just that. Please don’t let it come to that.
September 14th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
For those of us who thought Chafee was to weak on national security, I guess someone should have made a caricature of him in black-face, and published it on the Huffington blog.