Lessons both parties should take away from Tuesday's big primaries-New Republic

[pampango]

http://www.tnr.com/article/75042/the-center-wins-again

By that measure, the Democrats can be pleased with the results of the May 18 elections. They won the only head-to-head contest with a Republican—a congressional election in Pennsylvania to fill the seat of the late John Murtha—by capturing the center in a fairly conservative district. And in Kentucky, the Republicans nominated Rand Paul, a flamboyant radical and favorite of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, to run for Senate in the fall. Indeed, if the Democrats can make the fall elections a referendum on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, they may avoid the disaster that political prognosticators have been crowing about for months.

In Northwest Pennsylvania’s Twelfth District, the Democrats ran a colorless former Murtha staffer, Mark Critz, against Tim Burns, a glib Republican who championed the Tea Party and tried to make the election a referendum on Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Critz ran to Burns’s left, but to the right of the national party. He was pro-life and pro-gun. He said he would have opposed the health care bill because its anti-abortion provisions were not strong enough, but unlike Burns, he did not favor repealing it.

Critz failed to inspire voters—a Public Policy poll on the eve of the election showed his unfavorables exceeding his favorables—but in the end the election wasn’t about him. It was about whether the radical Burns would continue, or attempt to undo, Murtha’s legacy of bringing federal spending to the district. The voters were clearly worried that he would not.

Which brings us to Kentucky. Rand Paul, who won his closed primary battle by a large margin Tuesday night over Tray Grayson, the Republican establishment candidate, has advocated abolishing the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. These were exactly the kinds of positions that doomed the Republicans after they captured the Congress in November 1994. Now, Paul might win in the fall against Democrat Jack Conway (this is Kentucky, after all), and even a Tea Party Republican is likely to win in Utah (where the longstanding Republican incumbent Bob Bennett was just ousted in a party convention), but these victories for the Republican right push the national party into the arms of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin—and that’s bad news for them.

[Bitwit1234]

1. Democrats won and they are going to take no prisoners in November

we are going to send them down down down to obscurity. Tell the radical republicans and tea bags, that the republicans in congress need to pack their bags, cause they are going home.