Franken has turned out to be a great Senator, better than I thought he would be I admit. But I wasn't involved in the whole pro Coleman thing between you and Lunar, plus there was no tea party candidate involved in that race, so it shouldn't really apply to this question.
It's more subtle than that. There's a whole slew of issues Grayson was more moderate than Rand Paul on. For example, Grayson supported the Fourteenth Amendment, Paul does not. Grayson supported ADA, Paul does not. And more too. Sure you can say, "Well the 14th amendment isn't in danger, ADA isn't in danger, blah blah", but in my opinion, even having someone in the Senate who holds those views is dangerous. There was a time when only a few rogue Senators such as Barry Goldwater wanted to merge the GOP with movement conservatism... over time that grew to the whole party.
Battles don't just occur in the middle. Battles occur all along the line, across the political spectrum. For an extreme conservative view to become law, it first has to win over the GOP, then it has to win over a majority. Eventually, it may even win over a consensus. To overturn it, first you would have to break the consensus by getting progressives to oppose it. Then you would have to win over a majority. Eventually you could form your own counter consensus. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? It's like front lines and rear lines. The front lines are the battles on the "other side". If you lose that, it comes to the "general election" or prime time debate. If you lose that, you are thrown back into your own lines just to keep the debate alive. For example, on the abortion rights issue, the GOP lost the central battle but they've been very successful just by keeping the debate alive. Had liberals managed to create a pro-abortion rights consensus in the 1970s, things would have been very different.[/quote]
By that logic, the Republicans should be terrified of Dennis Kucinich. And there are probably more people in both houses of Congress who support single-payer than support the gold standard or the stuff you mentioned and that probably won't change post-election either.
Understand? Understand why it's important to fight everywhere? Why having mainstream conservatives win GOP primaries might be better news for progressives than having far-right, Overton window shifting tea partiers?
And I don't really care about that if the teabaggers are far easier to defeat (like Angle.)
Beet has this weird fetish with Republicans who don't talk as outright crazy as the teabaggers yet still support the teabaggers on 95% of the issues and an even higher percentage on what they vote on. Remember his love affair with Trey Grayson who is probably to the right of McConnell.
Well first of all, Meek is a loser too. He's a guy who basically inherited his seat from his mother and never faced any opposition (note that I didn't say "serious opposition", he literally has had no opponents in the general election or primary since being elected except a Libertarian or something some year.) yet still tries to take Moderate Hero-esque positions. Second Crist is in a much better position to be a crossover as he was never a senator and had no voting record and has been pissing off Republicans the whole time as Governor. Murkowski on the other hand isn't much different than Mark Kirk, a GOP hack who happens to be pro-choice (and at least Kirk is solidly pro-choice, Murkowski wavers on even that.) And I don't see Murkowski as being like Lieberman or what I think Crist would be in willing to go out of her way to piss off the Republicans, more than likely she'd promise to be a lapdog as much as possible to make sure she never loses the primary again.
