After his 34% win in the four-man GOP Senate primary Tuesday night, Tommy Thompson will keep lurching to the Right, where the party base is and where, really, he's never been - - and also where partisan voters selected more authentically conservative choices 2:1.
This is all good for Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic nominee who, mercifully, will never rise to Tommy's level of self-promotion or unprincipled flip-flopping.
Let her scoop up moderates and independents and discerning Republicans and younger voters who don't suffer phonies and see little to justify sending Tommy back through the revolving door to DC to schmooze with his insider pals, on the public dime, Tuesdays-through-Thursdays.
Interesting, too, that Tommy was a moderate Governor who ran to the far-right opportunistically just like Mott Romney - - another formerly moderate Republican Governor willing to turn his earlier identity inside out for the chance at higher office.
It tells us something about the character of these candidates and their party, too, as they try to switch from selling snake oil to administering anesthesia, hoping to benefit from the short-term memory wipe out it induces.
Seriously? If he leans further to the right, he'll tip over. If you would review his policies and rhetoric going back to the 1980s, when he launched his war against the utterly powerless, what you'll see is a political philosophy akin to fascism (not in the popular insulting sense, but in the sense of Mussolini's agenda in WWll). Our middle class never gave it much thought because back then. Thompson's target was "just the poor." Few paid attention to the actual policies against the poor (loss of legal/human rights), or the rhetoric that justified those policies, so there continues to be no discussion about how this right-wing agenda so powerfully works to weaken and shrink the middle class.
ReplyDelete"...Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic nominee who, mercifully, will never rise to Tommy's level of self-promotion or unprincipled flip-flopping."
ReplyDeleteGood point, James. But "rise" is not quite the word or image to adequately describe Tommy's coming nosedive/descent into sleaze and right-wing pandering.
If you actualy belive that Tammy even has a remote chance of bneating Tommy in a state wide election you must has had a double helping of progressive kool-aid. Not onbly will Tommy win but he will win by more than 10 points.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, I've seen both Tommy and Tammy in person within the past two weeks. Tommy is 21 years older and looks every bit of it. I think a majority of Wisconsinites will conclude that it's ridiculous to elect a 71-year-old freshman senator.
ReplyDeleteIt would even be more ridiculous to elect a senator from the isthmus in Madison.
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