Courting the base

Last week, in response to a post from guest Sue Jeffers, Skipper left the comment.

Insisting on ideological purity isn't too bright an idea. Most Americans don't share your extremist right wing neocon philosophy!

To which I responded:

And I think that I can safely say that the vast majority of the voters don't share the extremist ideas of the far left either Skipper....

Yet if this story from today's Star Tribune political blog is any indication, that is exactly where the far left roots of the Democrat Party are going.

Mark Pera has a standard attack line against his incumbent congressional opponent, one he loves enough to repeat four times in a 10-minute interview.

"Every time Bush needs a vote," the Democratic attorney from Western Springs, Ill., says, "he turns to Dan Lipinski and gets it."

Independent ratings show Lipinski, a second-term Democrat, actually voted with the Republican president less than 20 percent of the time this year (down from about half the time in 2006). But he's backed the presidential position on at least one key vote over the Iraq war — and he's suggested war opponents are better served by working across party lines than by sending withdrawal timelines out for repeated presidential vetoes.

That, in the new Democratic Congress, is enough to draw Lipinski an Internet-fueled primary challenge from the left.

Frustrated with Democrats' failure to thwart Bush on Iraq and other issues after winning House and Senate control in 2006, Internet activists deride Lipinski and about 40 other Democratic members of Congress as "Bush Dogs" for their votes on the war and warrantless wiretapping. The activists have targeted those lawmakers with attack ads, scathing blog posts and, in Lipinski's case, financial help for his primary foe. Pera outraised Lipinski last quarter, a rarity for a challenger, thanks in part to the $30,000 he recently raised online over a two-week period.

So there you have it, Republicans and Democrats are doing what they have done for decades....courting the base as the base is demanding attention! This is what happens in the Primary season. Yet when Republicans (like Sue or I) do it, we are called "extremists". Therein lies the "do as we say not as we do" mentality of the leftist base of the Democratic Party.