| Bill Owens of NY-23, who just beat Doug Hoffman days ago, was pilloried by a few liberals here and elsewhere as too conservative. He was against the public option, he was too this, he was not enough that, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Well, a week before the election when he was running tight-as-a-tick in a purple district, he came out in the middle of the last campaign debate in favor of the House health care bill. He reiterated support right after he was sworn in. And last night he voted yes.
Meanwhile, Scott Murphy, as I recall, received only open hearts and minds on this blog earlier this year as he tried to pull off an upset win in a district similar to Owens' NY-23, as he ran tying himself to Obama.
Well, last night Murphy voted NO on Obama's biggest signature legislative effort.
This isn't a diary to bash Murphy. Far from it. I have no regrets about having wanted Murphy to win that special election, and I still want him to hold the seat next November.
My point is that when it comes to open-seat races and Democratic challengers to Rethug incumbents, supporting the Democrat always is the best bet. It's foolish game-playing to hope a moderate Republican wins and somehow votes with us as much as an allegedly Blue Dog Democrat would have.
And it's even more foolish to hope someone like Doug Hoffman wins. Thanks to Owens' victory, not only did we get a critical vote for health care, we defanged the hard right. And we did so without discouraging them at all from attacking the likes of Charlie Crist and Mark Kirk in Republican primaries next year--they're encouraged enough from having knocked out Scozzafava. We got the best of every world.
And President Obama and Chief of Staff Emanuel deserve credit for the setup that allowed this to happen. It proved a critical victory in the post-election narrative after we lost with a hopeless incumbent in NJ and a terrible candidate in VA.
The moral of the story is support Democrats in elections, because in the long run that's what helps us the most. There are exceptions, there are Liebermans out there who need to be primaried and, if they survive, maybe in extraordinary circumstances have support withheld in the general and allow a Republican to win; I easily can picture scenarios, even if very rare, when the long-term and even short-term for the party is better with that outcome. But rare is the operative term for that kind of scenario. By and large, supporting the Democrat gets us a lot closer to where we want to be in the House and Senate chambers. |
