Passionate Primaries

Tomorrow’s going to be an awfully interesting day for fans for American politics.
Two incumbent Democratic Senators, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both face tough primary challenges from the left. I stink at predicting, but I think Specter is toast. And I don’t know enough about politics is Arkansas to understand what will happen there.
Lincoln has tried to survive by being a centrist Democrat, but ours is not a kind world for centrists. Lincoln was against the public option in a health care bill, so liberals in her own party are taking aim at her. She alienated Republicans in Arkansas—something that I suspect is easy to do—by supporting parts of the president’s agenda. All this prompted Lt. Gov. Bill Halter to run against her, but the New York Times has a piece today(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/politics/17pennsylvania.html?scp=3&sq=arlen%20specter&st=cse) in the race where John Brummett, a columnist at the Arkansas News, quips of the Democratic primary: “All we’re doing here is picking someone to get beat in November.” The Republicans are likely to win the seat in the fall.
Over in Pennsylvania, the chickens are coming home to roost for Specter, who has always had a constituency of one: Arlen Specter. He was talking a lot last week about his reputation of bringing home the bacon for Pennsylvania. But his history is long…he’s the guy who trashed Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings a couple of political lifetimes ago…and it will not be all that sad to see him go. His challenger is in the Democratic primary, Rep. Joe Sestak, had the guts to run when it looked like he would not be able to beat Specter, who switched to the Democratic Party last year. Now Sestak seems like he would be as strong as Specter as the Democratic nominee.
The results will tell us something, yes, about the much-mentioned anger that’s alive in both parties, the anti-Washington mood. But turnout numbers always tell us something else, something important about the level of engagement of voters. Those numbers tend to be kind of sad, even in years when our papers and cable TV shows tell us that we’re awfully angry about things. The most important thing, in an exciting election or a boring one, is to vote.