The Truth of the Moment

I've been predicting this for months, ever since the healthcare reform bill passed, that any poll numbers pointing to outsized GOP gains in the November election would erode by that time. Once the lefties had time to get over their wounds on the reform not being as lefty as they'd have liked, once the actual candidates became better known, once it became clear that the President and Dems had delivered on most of their promises, once Obama started campaigning, once America began seeing the Tea Partiers irrevocably subverting the Republican Party.

Dana Milbank has the goods, and the best piece I've ever seen from him -- worth reading in full, but here's a taste:

Future historians tracing the crackup of the Republican Party may well look to May 8, 2010, as an inflection point.

That was the day, as is now well known, that Sen. Robert Bennett, who took the conservative position 84 percent of the time over his career, was deemed not conservative enough by fellow Utah Republicans and booted out of the primary.

Less well known, but equally ominous, is what happened that same day, 2,500 miles east in Maine. There, the state Republican Party chucked its platform -- a sensible New England mix of free-market economics and conservation -- and adopted a manifesto of insanity: abolishing the Federal Reserve, calling global warming a "myth," sealing the border, and, as a final plank, fighting "efforts to create a one world government.

...

In the Alabama gubernatorial race, a conservative attack ad charged that a Republican gubernatorial candidate "recently said the Bible is only partially true." The outraged candidate reaffirmed his "belief that this world and everything in it is a masterpiece created by the hands of God."

In Utah, just a couple of days after Bennett's fall, conservative Rep. Jason Chaffetz talked about trying to topple none other than Sen. Orrin Hatch (89 percent lifetime conservative rating) in 2012.

In Arizona, Sen. John McCain, who once said a fence is the "least effective" way to secure the border, continued his fight against a conservative primary challenge by releasing an ad demanding, "Complete the danged fence."

Democrats are having purity putsches, too, in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Colorado. But these are mild compared with the sort of uprising Republicans are experiencing in places such as Maine, tranquil land of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow...

This is the fruit of the Ronald Reagan deal with the Far Right religious bloc and the California Birchers. The conspiracy theorists on the Left are in abeyance, the Democratic Party led by the calmest President since Eisenhower (and his daughter endorsed Obama), but on the Right they are in the process of completely hijacking the Republican Party. There's no common-sensors from New England coming to save the day; they just lost their very own convention.

It's like Dick Armey, who's FreedomWorks is behind much of the teabaggin' organizing, has his own political party. But the grassroots side of it is the biggest incursion of terrified, angry and self-righteous reactionary force into contemporary politics since the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, the Dick Nixon Southern Strategy. If this works, if these Beck-blinded psychos get control of the House, Senate or, God-forbid, White House, you can rewind America thirty-odd years.

With this in mind, I say it's time for the Dems to toss out some of their old and put some of our own worthy anti-incumbents in place. Joe Sestak should defeat Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Senate Primary. Arkansas Dem voters should replace Sen. Blanche Lincoln with candidate Bill Halter. In an anti-incumbency election, fresh blood where weakest.

Then see which way America goes.

Bonus video: Sneak preview of the winning campaign theme: