Chatham Dems

The Democratic Strategist comments:

In Virginia last week, Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, announced with some visible bitterness that he would not run for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. John Warner. His reason is that the Virginia Republican Party has decided to use a convention instead of a primary to choose their challenger to Democrat Mark Warner in the 2008 election. The convention will be dominated by conservatives who will choose former Gov. Jim Gilmore over moderate Tom. Davis. This pretty much guarantees a Democratic win for Mark Warner.

This decision to hand Gilmore the Senate nomination can only be understood under the bizarre theory that Virginia Republicans have been losing because they are insufficiently conservative, or as the expression of a death wish, reflecting a determination to hold onto intraparty power at the expense of real governing power.

Virginia is only the latest example of this phenomenon, as explained by Ron Brownstein in a column today.

The conventional wisdom on this subject remains that both parties are under the control of their activist “bases,” and that moderates in both parties are being hunted to extinction. But as Kevin Drum accurately suggests in his commentary on Brownstein’s column, this equivalency argument is just wrong:

Every two years the losing party has this exact same conversation: (a) move to the center to appeal more to swing voters, or (b) move left (right) in order to stay true to the party’s liberal (conservative) heritage? My sense is that (b) is almost always the choice after the first loss or two, after which (a) finally wins out.
This year, though, we’re in a historically odd position. The Republican Party is still in stage (b), but to a smaller extent, the Democrats are back there too. The Democratic Party spent so long in stage (a) during the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic party is moving left from 4 to 3.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.

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