Inappropriate Content: C&C

Let's play a game of compare and contrast today. It's April 2005, a much as I can be trusted on that sort of thing, and there is only one thing on the minds of Howard Dean and Ken Mehlman, our erstwhile party chairmen and much diminished heirs to the power of the legendary bosses of Tammany Hall, and that is the 1/3rd of the U.S. Senate which comes up for re-election in 2006: the men who will, once again, feel the fickle attentions of the electorate upon their undead, incumbent flesh.

There are few open contests. Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords will not be seeking another term, as we all knew would happen when he decided in 2000 that he valued his integrity more than his party loyalty, and so doomed himself to honor and a quiet retirement. But aside from that, the political parties, those twin knights-in-armor who nobly protect the People from democracy unchecked, know that they must defeat a few sitting senators to achieve their dreams, the Democrat's being to regain a majority, the Republican's a filibuster-proof sixty senators, or as my friend Quilly Mammoth™ calls it from his Oklahoma lair, “60 in 06.”

And this is where we play our little game, comparing the senator most targeted by the Democrats, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, to the Republican's prey, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. Both these Senators come from the area too far west to be the Northeast, too far east to be the Midwest, and too far north to be the South: it is the heartland's no-mans-land, to coin a phrase. But aside from location, there Byrd and Santorum have practically nothing in common.

Santorum, Pennsylvania's junior senator, rides the wave of what one commentator calls the “Fourth Great Awakening,” a latter-day religious revival that is, we are told, sweeping the heartland, as Jesus Saves relentlessly, leaving atheists, sodomites, and liberals cowering in their urban bunkers, while the Lord prepares, as usual, to return triumphant, in George Bush's Jerusalem, or Mitt Romney's Illinois, if the Mormons have it right. (Harry Reid's home in Nevada makes him more of a “California Mormon,” as they are called in Salt Lake City, than a real Mormon.) Santorum is the number three man in the Senate GOP leadership, if Newsweek is to be believed, and top Republican in their 2005 “Who's Next” issue. He is a self-proclaimed leader for the much-debated “moral values” voters and potential 2008 GOP presidential candidate.

Odd that the Democrats should think a standard-bearer for such righteous rightists would be a possible loser in the next race? Not really. Santorum picked up some dedicated—you might say “rabid”—opposition with his comments a while back comparing homosexual marriage with “man-on-dog action.” (An absurd notion because, as many queer couples in Gavin Newsom's Sodom and Ted Kennedy's Gemorrah are no doubt now learning, marriage is usually the end of all action of any kind.) His moves may have been somewhat calculated: in 2004, when Bush needed surrogates to excite the sort of voter who is excited by man-on-dog action, so to speak, Santorum was the first to champion the Word of Dog—er, God. Now, with a second Bush administration secure and his own election on the horizon, Santorum is no longer the one railing against the “massive usurpation of power by the judiciary,” as he once described the 1964 Supreme Court case that delcared Americans have a right to privacy. But his wing-nut image may be hard to ditch. Our nation's leading sex-advice columnist is spear-heading a campaign to make Santorum's name synonymous with a certain substance who's nature is unfit for publication in a free press (which hasn't stopped me from saying it). The senator may simply be unable to get rid of his hard-line image. As he's now more than ten points behind a Democratic opponent who hasn't even won the primary yet, Santorum is no doubt under tremendous pressure to try. I'm not predicting that he'll go back to being the pot-smoking “casual Catholic” he was in the 70s, but there might be less emphasis on just how much he's changed.

Or he may actually believe what he's saying; and we all saw how well that worked out for Jim Jeffords, eh?

We all know that the “moral values” label can be a liability in an election, especially in a state with so many blue-collar voters as Pennsylvania, voters who don't give a shit who's marrying who in Boston as long as the factories in Pittsburgh don't lay anyone else off. What's important here is the Democrats are going right for one of the most young, energetic figures in the Republican party. The Republicans, by contrast (remember when I said this was a compare and contrast post?) are not going after the Democrat's young bucks. In fact, the GOP chairman, Ken Mehlman, is reaching out: he has lunch every week with freshman Senator and D.C. heartthrob Barak Obama.

Instead, the early target of the Republicans in 2006 looks to be West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd, the senate's longest-serving member and a democratic institution. I must admit to taking that attack a little bit personally; I know several people on Byrd's staff, some very well; in fact, I know at least one person who works for and/or is married to each West Virginia politician I mention in this post, except for Republican Shelley Moore Capito. In any case, I lived on Robert C. Byrd Drive when I lived in Charleston. Then again, it's difficult to live in West Virginia and not live on a road named after Robert C. Byrd. I sent a letter to the Charleston Gazette complaining that the GOP was targeting Byrd for political reasons, although being shocked that a political party would engage in politics is a bit of a “gambling in Rick's!” moment.

The conventional wisdom, as explained to me by a Democratic legislative aide*, is that sometimes the parties go after a “sacred cow,” simply to make headlines. And there may be some truth to that. But Mehlman would accomplish several things by orchestrating a defeat for Byrd. His likely candidate, Capito, is a fairly popular West Virginia congresswoman who would be difficult to defeat in a state where senators, historically, serve for many, many years: Byrd has been in the senate since 1958, West Virginia's junior senator, Jay Rockefeller, has served since 1984. This is doubly important when you consider that, in the event the 88-year-old Byrd dies or retires partly into a new six-year term, West Virginia's Democratic governor, Joe Manchin, would appoint a replacement, who would then have time to build a reputation before running for re-election. But most importantly of all, by defeating Byrd, Mehlman could demonstrate the Democratic Party is very vulnerable in rural and religious areas, no matter how solidly the party appears.

Everyone claims that the political climate has shifted drastically since Clinton left office and 9/11 rewired our national identity. To learn exactly how and where the tides of history are taking us, we should turn our eyes to the heartland's no-mans-land.

*In my case, “Democratic legislative aide” usually means “some guy I chatted with on the subway or on at a sandwich place near the hill, who claimed to work in the congressional offices, but was was probably lying for effect, the way I often do.”