Academic

MICHAEL BARONE ON UTAH: Bob Bennett?s defeat in last Saturday?s Republican primary might be the beg?

By Glenn Reynolds

MICHAEL BARONE ON UTAH: Bob Bennett’s defeat in last Saturday’s Republican primary might be the beginning of a national trend

What riled Utah Republicans against Bob Bennett? One complaint was that he sponsored a health-care bill with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden to eliminate the tax preference for employer-provided health insurance and subsidize premiums. The party activists and tea partiers who thronged to the state party convention evidently have little appetite for bipartisan initiatives?even those that might have saved the republic from what they regard as the ravages of ObamaCare. More important, apparently, was Mr. Bennett’s vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program in September 2008. This was the kind of emergency legislation politicians expect to be unpopular but most regard as essential. Such bills tend to pass with the votes of members of both parties with safe seats. But sometimes those seats prove not to be so safe. Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss was nearly beaten in 2008 after voting for TARP. And now TARP seems to have ended the Senate career of Bob Bennett. . . .

If you move across the country, from the desert-like landscape where the Wasatch Mountains look out on the Great Salt Lake to the green trees in the hills and hollows of northern West Virginia, you find another defeated incumbent. Democrat Alan Mollohan was first elected to represent the 1st congressional district of West Virginia in 1982. His father was elected to represent the district nine times?in 1952 and 1954, and again from 1968 to 1980.

But 46 years of representation by the Mollohan family were rewarded with only 44% of the votes in last Tuesday’s Democratic primary. State Senator Mike Oliverio, who opposed the Democrats’ health-care bill, won 56%, carrying 14 of the district’s 20 counties.

Mr. Mollohan has been accused of using his senior position on the Appropriations Committee to earmark spending in ways that benefited him and his family?obviously a political liability. But he was also attacked for not strongly opposing the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill?unpopular in coal-dependent West Virginia?and for voting for the health-care bill after stating that he would not do so if it funded abortions.

I think that there are no longer any truly safe seats, and that the old-style political games aimed at fooling, or at least pacifying, the voters back home don’t work as well as they used to.

Barone concludes: “How many overdogs are in trouble? Probably more than those who currently think so.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on May 15, 2010 (boomark / email).