As viewers of the Daily Show’s occasional “Thank you, South Carolina!” features know, the Palmetto State has continued to burnish its reputation for exceptionally wacky politics this year.
But after writing up a preview of today’s Tennessee primary for FiveThirtyEight yesterday, I’d have to say the Volunteer State is making its own bid for dubious fame:

[Tennessee features] the nation’s most expensive House primary (GOP TN-8), a primary where the Club for Growth accidentally directed readers of a mailer to a phone sex line (GOP TN-3), a primary where a white Jewish incumbent has earned the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus in a campaign against the African-American former mayor of Memphis (Dem TN-9), and a primary where Sarah Palin delved into a crowded GOP field in a staunch Democratic district to endorse her latest “Mama Grizzly” (GOP TN-5). And all that fun doesn’t even include America’s latest viral video sensation, Republican gubernatorial candidate Basil Marceaux.

And that’s just scratching the surface, since Tennessee’s primary field also includes one major Republican gubernatorial candidate (a resident, BTW, of the famous C Street complex run by the secretive theocratic group The Family) who’s been threatening secession, and another who wondered out loud if Islam was not an actual religion but a “cult.” There’s one House candidate under attack because the radio station he owns plays hip-hop music, and another who is battling to protect the citizens of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from the awful specter of Sharia law.
The sheer nastiness of the Tennessee primaries led one congressional candidate to put out a press release observing: “We’re not picking someone to represent us at the next World Wrestling Federation SummerSlam.”
That’s debatable, I guess. But aficionados of the absurd (and for that matter, Democrats, since most of the fireworks are in GOP primaries) can only regret that Tennessee is the rare southern state without a majority-vote requirement, which means we won’t have the spectacle of runoffs to continue the craziness for another few weeks.

As you may have noticed, the latest right-wing “scandal” (at least for those who are not mesmerized by the “exposure” of liberal opinion in the leaked archives of the JournoList) is the planned construction of a mosque and Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York. This is essentially a local land use issue of the sort that New York authorities deal with every day, but the “threat” of this mosque has already become a cause celebre around the country, particularly with the Tea Party folk.
But the most radical reaction so far has been not from any Tea Party spokesman or talk radio jock, but from the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a putative presidential candidate in 2012, Newt Gingrich. Check this statement out:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

Yes, Gingrich is arguing that religious liberty for Muslims in the United States should be made contingent on religious liberty for non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Anything less is a “double standard.”
I suppose this sounds reasonable to people who think all or most Muslims are “Islamists,” or buy Newt’s dubious assertion that the name of the proposed facility, Cordoba House, is a deliberate Islamist provocation aimed at heralding some future armed conquest of the United States. But put aside the particulars here and think about the idea that a unilateral commitment to religious liberty by the United States represents a “double standard” inviting our destruction.
This isn’t a particularly new idea. For a very long time some American Protestants resisted full civil rights for Catholics on grounds that Catholic countries did not extend similar rights to Protestants. You’d think Newt Gingrich, as a very avid recent convert to Catholicism, would be aware of that history and its relevance to his “double standard” argument.
Newt’s line, of course, is an analog to the argument beloved of some conservatives that in the civilizational struggle with Islamism, American principles of decency–say, a reluctance to torture prisoners–are just signs of contemptible weakness that make our enemies laugh at us. It’s richly ironic that the kind of people who deeply believe in “American exceptionalism”–the notion that much of what is good on this planet would disappear if America began to resemble countries like Canada or England or France–are sometimes among the first to argue that America should abandon its distinctive beliefs whenever it is convenient. But Gingrich carries the freedom-is-weakness argument to a brand new extreme. Wonder how his fans would react if he suggested that the right to bear arms should be suspended for the duration of the War On Terror to keep guns out of the hands of Islamists? The mind reels.

I’ve found this year’s primaries in my home state of Georgia to be very interesting. Clearly, Georgians do not agree. Despite a host of competitive contests in both parties, total turnout in yesterday’s primaries was about 22%, which is pretty pathetic.
In any event, the consequences wrought by those few voters were pretty interesting. On the Democratic side, former governor Roy Barnes took the next step in his attempted redemption from a huge stumble in 2002, when his grossly overconfident re-election campaign was upset by a party-switching good ol’ boy named Sonny Perdue. This time around Barnes impressively defeated an African-American statewide elected official by a three-to-one margin, doing especially well in heavily African-American urban areas. Two Democratic congressmen, Hank Johnson and John Barrow, survived primary challenges.
Republicans set themselves up for some potentially wild-and-crazy runoffs. Sarah Palin’s candidate, Karen Handel, will face Newt Gingrich’s candidate, Nathan Deal, on August 10. All kinds of nastiness between these two candidate broke out late in the primary contest; Handel has basically called Deal a crook and Deal has basically called Handel a godless liberal. It’s not likely to get more civil in the runoff.
The Republican congressional primaries produced some odd results, too. You have to have some sympathy for 9th district congressman Tom Graves. He won his gig after a special election in May and then a runoff in June, all because Nathan Deal resigned the seat to (take your pick) devote more time to his gubernatorial campaign or short-circuit an ethics investigation. Then he had to run for a full term in yesterday’s primary, and once again, he’s in a runoff against the same candidate, Lee Hawkins. So Graves and Hawkins will be facing each other for the fourth time in three months.
Then you’ve got state Rep. Clay Cox, who was endorsed by a who’s-who of Georgia Republican politics in his bid to succeed the venerable right-winger John Linder in a safe GOP district. Cox dutifully endorsed Linder’s hobby-horse, the “Fair Tax” proposal, and did everything else expected of him. But he finished a poor third, losing not only to Linder’s former chief of staff, Rob Woodall, but also to talk radio host Jody Hice.
In general, the August 10 runoffs will be mostly a Republican affair, and in that rarefied company, we can expect a lot of more-conservative-than-thou one-upsmanship. Looking forward to the general election, Democrats are in reasonably good shape to do relatvely well in this red state, in this bad year.

There’s an interesting sub-drama playing out in the Nevada Senate race. (Update : Thanks to Jim Gibson for correcting the state) Kristi Keck at CNN.com reports on Sharron Angle’s efforts to tone down her message and persona to the point where she appears to have an actual chance of being taken seriously by a majority of voters. Here’s how it’s playing in the website campaign:

In Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle last week unveiled a revamped website that no longer details some of her more controversial positions, such as her calls to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and support for a nuclear waste dump facility at Yucca Mountain.
The campaign of Angle’s November opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, posted a copy of Angle’s original site at www.therealsharronangle.com. Angle’s campaign sent a “cease and desist” letter to Reid’s campaign, saying that the website falsely represented itself as Angle’s website.
Reid’s campaign temporarily removed the site, but the Nevada Democratic Party reposted it, claiming First Amendment protection. Reid’s campaign said Angle was trying to mask her views, but Angle’s campaign insisted its Democratic opponent was “doing desperate things to win.”

Keck quotes Angle copping a plea on a conservative radio program: “Today, I actually softened because I’m being held accountable for every idle word.” Not being a career politician, she said she doesn’t always say the best words.
John Avlon, author of “Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America,” explains in Keck’s article: “When you are all of a sudden confronted with the possibility of real governance, then some of the red meat stops making practical sense…” TDS contributor Alan Abramowitz, author of “The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy,” adds “It’s when some Tea Party candidates or figures start engaging in Obama derangement syndrome that their message starts becoming political kryptonite.”
One of the most devastating takes on Angle’s campaign comes from GOP veteran insider Michael Gerson, who writes in his WaPo op-ed column this morning:

The Republican wave carries along a group that strikes a faux revolutionary pose. “Our Founding Fathers,” says Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle, “they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”
…Mainstream conservatives have been strangely disoriented by Tea Party excess, unable to distinguish the injudicious from the outrageous. Some rose to Angle’s defense or attacked her critics. Just to be clear: A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt — a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of “Second Amendment remedies” is a light-weight Lexington, a cut-rate Concord. It is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory.

Gerson notes that, in her fondness for excess, Angle is not alone among the current crop of high-profile GOP candidates:

The Republican wave also carries along a group of libertarians, such as Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul. Since expressing a preference for property rights above civil rights protections — revisiting the segregated lunch counter — Paul has minimized his contact with the media. The source of this caution is instructive. The fear is not that Paul will make gaffes or mistakes but, rather, that he will further reveal his own political views. In America, the ideology of libertarianism is itself a scandal. It involves not only a retreat from Obamaism but a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments…. Libertarianism has a rigorous ideological coldness at its core. Voters are alienated when that core is exposed. And Paul is now neck and neck with his Democratic opponent in a race a Republican should easily win.

Gerson goes on to add that the GOP “wave carries along a group more interested in stigmatizing immigrants than winning their support” and he laments the response of too many Republicans who should know better “to stay quiet, make no sudden moves and hope they go away.” He adds

…Significant portions of the Republican coalition believe that it is a desirable strategy to talk of armed revolution, embrace libertarian purity and alienate Hispanic voters… With a major Republican victory in November, those who hold these views may well be elevated in profile and influence. And this could create durable, destructive perceptions of the Republican Party that would take decades to change. A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them.

For Dems, we can hope that enough swing voters will get it sooner than later, in time to tell the Republicans in November “Go sell crazy somewhere else. We’ve got serious problems here, and this is no time for tea party nonsense.”

Almost all the discussions of the “enthusiasm gap” in recent weeks have tended to define the problem as the low level of enthusiasm among Democrats – a perspective that tends to suggest that “disappointment” with Obama is probably the major cause. From this perspective the most direct response would appear to be for Democratic strategists to try to challenge and refute this perception – to argue, in effect, that “Obama is really better than many Democrats seem to think he is”.
But, in fact, Democratic enthusiasm only appears as dramatically low as it does in this non-presidential election year (when turnout is far below election years in any case) because it is being compared with the unusually high level of Republican enthusiasm. This alternate way of viewing the issue leads to a very different set of conclusions about the strategy Democrats should use to combat the problem.
The key fact is that Republicans and conservatives do not see this race as anything like a normal off-year election. Instead, it is for them a decisive battle in a life-or-death existential struggle — a no-holds-barred campaign to bring down Obama and reverse the 2008 election. It is a vision of politics as a bitter ideological and social war and conservatives as an army on the march with a vast overarching objective — to “take back our country” from the forces that have literally stolen it from its rightful owners.
At the heart of the current conservative/Republican coalition is a powerfully energized conservative social movement – one with very strong and widely shared military and paramilitary overtones. This generates a high level of what in military terms is called “morale” – a powerful mixture of passion, commitment, élan, fighting spirit, camaraderie and group cohesion.
Among the core conservative activists themselves this high level of morale has developed in the course of work and collaboration. During the last year and a half friendships were formed, afternoons and weekends were spent working together on projects, successes and failures were shared, all of which built team spirit, optimism and a shared vision of heroic struggle against a uniquely evil, dedicated foe. This energy and enthusiasm was then propagated out into the comment threads of conservative blogs, the discussion groups on Tea Party websites and through e-mail chain letters passed virally among families and social circles. This process has established and disseminated an essentially warlike and combative tone to the 2010 Republican campaign that easily meshes with the similarly combative programming of Fox news and talk radio. The resulting mixture has then been transmitted again and again to a large portion of the Republican electorate.
There is simply nothing comparable to this psychology on the Democratic side. Large numbers of the voters who comprised the Obama coalition in 2008 simply do not see the 2010 elections as a vast do-or-die battle between two contending political armies struggling for control of the country and the future of America. They see it as a conventional off-year election where a patchwork variety of opposing candidates with different philosophies compete for office. As a result they simply do not have the high morale and fighting spirit of conservatives and Republicans. The broad and unifying “yes we can” spirit that was created during the 2008 campaign dissipated soon after the election. The massive Obama for America online organization sharply narrowed its focus to building support for specific elements of Obama’s agenda while other progressives redirected their efforts to promoting specific progressive issues and causes – a focus that frequently brought them into conflict with the administration. Both of these trends substantially diluted and dampened the broad “yes we can” unity and enthusiasm of the 2008 campaign.
The inevitable result was lowered morale, a literal demoralization of the Democratic base that is expressed in three distinct narratives

• That Obama has been a disappointment to his supporters and that not bothering to vote is therefore a logical reaction.
• That the Democratic candidate in a particular district is insufficiently progressive or otherwise unappealing and that not voting for him or her is therefore a reasonable reaction.
• That Washington politics is hopeless and that there is consequently no reason to participate in a useless exercise.

All of these reactions reflect a shared mental model of 2010 as a typical election and not a major and coordinated conservative assault on Democrats in a bitter ideological war. It is this notion of “2010 as just a normal election” that Democratic strategy must first and foremost challenge.

Read more…

The MSM is having quite a gush-fest about the Fiorina and Whitman primary wins in California. Fresh faces, huge amounts of campaign cash, historic wins for GOP women and all that. Dem nominees Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer begin their races dwarfed by a tidal wave of overwhelmingly favorable coverage for their opponents.
If not for Fiorina’s “so yesterday” gaffe about Senator Boxer’s hairdo, she would have gotten the same free ride that the bedazzled media has given Whitman since Tuesday. Boxer and Brown no doubt write it off as a familiar pattern of media coverage. The new kid usually gets the breathless MSM buzz after primaries, especially in a political year that has been roundly designated as a bummer for incumbents.
But it won’t be long before the sobering demographic realities of the California electorate force a reassessment among the punditry. In his WaPo op-ed, “Calif. GOP Primary Winners Look Headed for Defeat,” Harold Meyerson explains,

…California Republican primaries have a nasty habit of rendering their winners unelectable in November, and this year’s contest looks like it will be no exception. To win, Whitman and Fiorina — conventional conservative business Republicans both — had to take positions so far to the right that their chances of winning a state in which Barack Obama commands a 59 percent approval rating are slim. During one debate with her Republican opponents, Fiorina affirmed the right of suspected terrorists on no-fly lists to buy guns, presumably lest the gods of the National Rifle Association strike her dead on the spot. At a campaign event at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday, Boxer, never one to let a hanging curveball go unswatted, contrasted Fiorina’s guns-to-terrorists stance with her own co-authorship of a law allowing pilots to carry guns in cockpits.

And then there is the thorniest (for Republicans) of issues:

But the issue most damaging for Whitman and Fiorina is immigration. Pressed by their GOP primary opponents and the Republican electorate to endorse Arizona’s draconian new law, Fiorina proclaimed her support for it while Whitman countered the charges from her right that she was soft on immigration by affirming that she was “100 percent against amnesty” and demanding a huge increase in border enforcement. To bolster her credibility, her ads featured former Republican governor Pete Wilson — champion of 1994’s Proposition 187, which would have denied all public services, including the right to attend primary and secondary schools, to illegal immigrants.
Wilson won reelection in 1994 by backing 187, which the courts subsequently struck down. But his victory was probably the most pyrrhic in modern American politics. Threatened and enraged by 187, California’s Latino immigrants began naturalizing, registering and voting in record numbers. Southern California’s Latino-led labor movement — the most energized and strategically savvy labor movement in the nation — became particularly adept at turning out Latino voters for Democratic candidates and causes.
…the California electorate has been transformed — moving the state decisively into the Democratic column. In the 1994 election, according to the nonprofit William C. Velásquez Institute, which seeks to raise minorities’ political and economic participation, Latinos counted for 11.4 percent of California voters. By 2008, they comprised 21.4 percent. And particularly when immigration is an issue, theirs is a heavily Democratic vote. “There’s a whole generation of Latino voters who don’t believe the Republicans look out for them,” Maria Elena Durazo, who heads the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, told me on Election Day. “We ran against Pete Wilson for years after he was out of office. And, voilà! He’s back — he’s vouching for Whitman!” Labor will make sure the Latino community knows it. Already, the California Nurses Association is running an ad on Spanish-language radio that splices in a clip from a Whitman primary commercial in which she and Wilson discuss cracking down on immigration.

Meyerson concludes,

It’s not just that Republican nativism pushes perhaps a fifth of the electorate into the Democratic column. It’s that the state’s Republicans are simply far to the right of the majority of Californians — so much so that they do not have a majority of registered voters in any one of the state’s 53 congressional districts…In winning their nominations, they [Whitman and Fiorina] said things deeply offensive to a fatally large swath of California voters. Their campaigns may be gold-plated, but they have ears of purest tin.

Add to that the fact that Jerry Brown may be one of the most battle-seasoned candidates in history, having won grueling campaigns for Governor of California, Mayor of Oakland, CA Attorney-General and having won and lost presidential primaries. The media didn’t cover his comments well, but Brown will not be giving Whitman an easy time of it. He has already blasted Whitman for spending $71 million on her primary campaign, and added in his recent press conference,

“She paid herself $120 million, and then EBay had to lay off 10 percent of its workforce. Now, is that waste and abuse? Is that what you want?”

In stark contrast, Brown had an impressive record of budget management and job creation during his stint as governor, while living a life of unprecedented austerity for the chief executive of the nation’s largest state. As Brown noted in his news conference,

When I was governor of California, we built up the largest surplus in history — $4.5 billion. We created 1.9 million jobs. We reduced taxes by billions

Whitman has already gone into handler-imposed seclusion, issuing lame statements about Brown’s website not being up to snuff and bragging about her issues brochure, which Brown derided for being lavishly illustrated with photos, but way short on substance. Californians worried about their job security, pensions and education of their children are not likely to prefer Whitman’s track record to Brown’s.
As for Fiorina, last year the biz rag web site ‘Condé Nast Portfolio’ designated Fiorina as one of “The 20 Worst American CEOs of All Time“, noting also,

A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005…HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.

Not a track record to inspire working people to vote for her, either.
If Whitman and Fiorina had been business leaders who had track records of living modestly while keeping concerns for their employees front and center, maybe Brown and Boxer would have more to worry about. As Republicans, however, both Fiorina and Whitman have more in common with Gordon Gekko than Abe Lincoln. The guess here is that the working people of California ain’t having it.

Turns out tea party darling Rand Paul will likely morph into just another garden-variety neo-con GOP candidate, if his Republican Party handlers get their way, and it appears that they will.
Paul’s Republican handlers forced him to cancel a “Meet the Press” appearance — only the third public figure in 62 years to reneg on his agreeement to be interviewed. Conservative commentator Michael Medved, who noted, “the other no-shows were Louis Farrakhan and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia,” outlined the strategy Paul’s Handlers will pursue:

It’s not too late to reboot his campaign but any effort to do so will require a new dose of rhetorical discipline and ferocious focus…He will also need to distance himself as quickly as possible from the fringe-candidate nuttiness surrounding his father’s two presidential campaigns (in 2008 and as a Libertarian standard-bearer in 1988). If he fails to do so he’ll suffer humiliating defeat but at least encourage Republicans across the country to disregard another Paulestinian presidential run in 2012 as a dangerous dead-end for conservatives who yearn for meaningful victories.

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell added, chillingly “He’s said quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage.” The Wall St. Journal Washington Wire reports that Jesse Benton, who coordinated media damage control for Paul’s father, has been brought in to help salvage his son’s campaign, and a staff shake-up is anticipated.
Paul has been nominated by his party for less than a week, and already he has ticked off African Americans, people with disabilities and miners with waffling explanations of his views. Not an impressive start.
As SoonerBlue2‘s blog, “Is Rand Paul folding like a cheap lawn chair?,” puts it”:

Rand Paul will be carted off and muzzled by the Republicans very soon .. rushed over to Fox News for damage control .. as they try to figure out how to spin a Republican nominee for the US Senate who opposes parts of the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Fair Housing Act.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports that the reedy-voiced Paul’s next big media appearance will be a Memorial Day radio interview with Louisville’s WHAS, which has the most powerful signal in the state. WHAS is owned by, you guessed it, Clear Channels, which features Rush Limbaugh and other reactionary yakkers. Expect softball.
Kentucky Attorney-General Jack Conway’s campaign ought to be flogging Paul’s MTP no-show for all that it is worth. “In Rand Paul, we have a candidate for the United States Senate who is scared to appear on America’s number one political affairs program and explain his views. What a wimp.”
Or, alternatively, “Does Kentucky, the state that produced fierce fighters like Henry Clay and Muhammed Ali, need to be represented by a U.S. Senator who is cowered by the big bad media? I think not.”
Or, more affirmatively, “Kentucky needs a Senator who is not afraid to be fully-engaged in the great issues of the day. Only one candidate has the courage and brains to meet this challenge, and his name is Jack Conway.”
The ‘wimp’ and ‘scardy-cat’ memes may best be promulgated by Conway’s Democratic supporters, rather than the candidate himself. But it would be a political sin to let Paul’s chicken-out from Meet the Press and other open forums go unchallenged.
Maybe Colorado Dems can lend some of those chicken suits to Kentucky Democrats who want to protest against the muzzling of Rand Paul.

The headline at Politico, under a banner that says “Turbulent Tuesday,” kinda says it all: “Sex, lies and primaries: Oh my!”
The “primaries” part of today’s political news was expected, of course, and if you’re behind the curve on those, you can read my pithy toughts here and here and here. (You should also check out J.P. Green’s item on the special House election in Pennsylvania). The only thing I have to add is that turnout in Pennsylvania and Kentucky seems to be light; the former is probably bad news for Arlen Specter.
The “sex” part of the day’s festivities involves Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana, a long-time “family values” conservative Republican who announced he was resigning his seat after his chief of staff confronted him with anonymous tips that he was having an affair with a part-time staffer. The staffer in question, who, like Souder, was married to someone else, was originally hired in 2004 to co-host a Souder radio show on a Christian station back home in Indiana. Souder did say the affair with the woman was “mutual,” which is apparently his way of saying “consensual.” His decision to resign rather than simply retiring at the end of the year was probably motivated by a desire to avoid an ethics investigation by the House, since having sex with House employees is very much against the rules.
As you might recall, Souder, a class of 1994 veteran, narrowly won renomination two weeks ago after fending off a challenge from a wealthy car dealer. Now Souder has plunged Hoosier Republicans into a complex scenario where they will have to hold a special election and also select a nominee for November. There’s some talk already that unsuccessful Senate candidate and hard-core-conservative favorite Marlin Stutzman could get one or the other nod.
Okay, that’s today’s sex news; on the “lies” front, Connecticut was roiled today by a New York Times story indicating that Democratic Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the odds-on favorite to succeed Chris Dodd in the Senate, has on at least a couple of occasions suggested erroneously that he fought in Vietnam (he actually served stateside in the Marine Reserves during the Vietnam War, after receiving a series of deferments). Blumenthal held a press conference today, and surrounded by veterans’ representatives, defiantly said he hadn’t done anything wrong beyond “misspeaking on occasion,” and pointedly did not indicate any intention rethinking of his Senate bid. The DSCC announced it was standing by its candidate.
Connecticut Democrats, as it happens, are holding their nominating convention this weekend. Thus they will have a few days to assess the damage and decide whether they want to go ahead with Blumenthal or find another candidate from their deep bench in the state.
Yeah, it’s been a rather turbulent day!