Either way, puppies will die
By An obscenely busy (yet curiously unproductive) schedule has kept me from reading much non-Alaskan coverage of our weird-ass Senate race, so I don’t know if Steve Kornacki’s optimistic take is representative of how folks are interpreting Murkowski’s decision to run as a write-in candidate. Yet here it is:
In Alaska, where it takes extraordinary circumstances for a Democrat to win a statewide election, Murkowski’s effort holds the potential of depriving Miller of the votes of less conservative Republicans (and Republican-friendly independents), leaving him with just the hard-right Tea Party base of the GOP. If that kind of split were to emerge, Scott McAdams, the Democratic candidate, would then have an opportunity to win by uniting the Democratic base and Democratic-friendly independents.
And therein rests the problem. There simply aren’t that many “Democratic friendly independents” in this state right now, and those who exist seem to be in the process of convincing themselves (along with a depressing number of actual Democrats) that Murkowski is the only alternative to Miller, a guy who disproves the thesis that bearded men are worthy of our trust. Now, given that Miller is a complete nutter, there’s no question that — at least so far as Alaskan interests are concerned (i.e., using your money and pretending we harvested it ourselves from moose innards) — he would be a worse Senator than Murkowski, especially if he received her spots on the Appropriations, Energy/Natural Resources, Indian Affairs and Health/Education/Labor/Pensions committees. Meanwhile, because the state Democratic party completely ignored the Senate race and spent all its energy trying to win Sarah Palin’s old job, we’ve got a Democratic candidate from a small Southeast Alaskan city whose lack of name recognition isn’t being helped by all the drama in the GOP. A decent fellow, McAdams is sadly not the sort of candidate who’s likely to inspire a stampede on election day. So I’m predicting that Kornacki has things backwards — Murkowski is going to siphon away a depressingly large number of Democratic votes from folks who will talk themselves into believing that she’s actually some kind of reasonable moderate. But it won’t be enough, and at the end of the day Joe Miller will be our next Senator.
He probably would have beaten Scott McAdams in a two-way race anyhow, but the willingness of good Democrats to line up behind Murkoski is kind of baffling. Joe Miller is a pinhead, but there’s no reason to reward Murkowski for being not quite as odious as Joe Miller — especially when that reputation isn’t all that well deserved. She chose (in the most cowardly way) not to help end DADT; she voted against reforming (even mildly) the institutions that fucked our economy in the ear; she voted against a health care bill comprised almost entirely of GOP ideas from 17 years ago, when the party was apparently less insane than today; she’s voted against extending unemployment benefits at least three times this year alone; she voted against the Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay Act in 2008; she voted against an insufficiently large stimulus bill; and on and on and on. For god’s sake, she voted against confirming Sotomayor and Kagan to the Supreme Court. And that’s not even getting into her wildly overrated status as a “pro-choice” Republican.
Look. If the Democrats put forward a bill making it a federal crime to kill and eat puppies, Lisa Murkowski would join her colleagues in opposing it. As would Joe Miller. He’d claim that opposition to puppy killing is the first step on the road to socialism; she’d claim that while she opposed puppy-killing in principle, she rather disliked the process that Democrats were using to remedy the problem. Either way, we’d have the blood of dead puppies on our hands.