Remember when Daniel Hannan warned gravely of the tyrannical threat of coalition government? As Hannan put it then:

The Westminster system, as favoured in most Anglosphere countries, encourages a clear division between government and opposition. This division helps keep the state small and the citizen free [bold mine-DL]. The party that is out of office has every reason to resist the expansion of state powers, while the party in office is wary of building a government machine that must one day fall into the hands of its opponents.

And again:

A ministry of all the talents, an end to partisan bickering, a national consensus – such have been the justifications of every dictatorship in history, from Bonaparte’s onwards.

Yes, well, it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. Here is the civil liberties section of the British coalition government’s agenda:

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.

We will introduce a Freedom Bill.

We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.

We will outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.

We will extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.

We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.

We will protect historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.

We will restore rights to non-violent protest.

We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

We will introduce safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.

We will further regulate CCTV.

We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason.

We will introduce a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

We will establish a Commission to investigate the creation of a British Bill of Rights that incorporates and builds on all our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, ensures that these rights continue to be enshrined in British law, and protects and extends British liberties. We will seek to promote a better understanding of the true scope of these obligations and liberties.

This is an encouraging beginning, and if the coalition can actually implement most or all of these measures it will have already done a lot to vindicate the coalition arrangement as a good one for Britain. I would add that this part of the agenda would probably be much less extensive and ambitious if the Liberal Democrats were not part of the government. Refreshingly, the perpetual no-hopers seem to have held on to their policy priorities now that they are in government. A Conservative minority government would probably not have troubled itself with as much of this. A Conservative majority government would have had the luxury of retaining many of the abusive Labour policies they inherited, knowing that the Labour opposition would not challenge practices that they implemented while in power.

Far from providing a check on expansive and intrusive government, the duopoly that prevailed earlier created a system in which both major parties were complicit in intrusive measures and each had incentives to collaborate with the other in crafting intrusive measures. As we can see in our own two-party system, the party out of power will tend to work with the governing party in expanding the reach of the security and surveillance state, because neither wants to deprive its future administrations of the power that these measures provide and neither wants to expose itself to the other’s attacks that it is “weak” on national security. Evidently, it takes the presence of a junior coalition partner strongly interested in civil liberties to begin rolling back some of these intrusions.

John Schwenkler and Conor Friedersdorf have both given appropriate answers to David Frum’s lament over Rand Paul’s victory, but I’d like to address another part of what Frum said. Frum wrote:

How is it that the GOP has lost its antibodies against a candidate like Rand Paul? In the past few months, we have seen GOP conservatives rally against Utah Sen. Bob Bennett [bold mine-DL]. There has been no similar rallying against Rand Paul: no ads by well-funded out-of-state groups.

Is Frum genuinely confused by the different reactions to the incumbent Bennett’s attempt to run for a third term after voting for the bailout and the first-time candidate Paul who opposed and denounced the bailout? If so, let me explain. On the most pressing economic and fiscal issues of the day, Paul was delivering a message that most conservatives want to hear. It was also a message that few on the right wanted to oppose openly. The Club for Growth spent something like $200,000 in the effort to defeat Bennett, because Bennett’s health care and bailout record made him one of their prime targets. The Club for Growth can sometimes do more electoral harm than good, but they obviously weren’t endangering control of a Senate seat in Utah by doing this. Rand Paul is in many respects the sort of candidate the Club for Growth embraces, so they were hardly going to mount an effort against him.

What of Paul’s foreign policy views? Why wasn’t there a serious effort by, say, Liz Cheney’s ridiculous organization Keep America Safe to derail Paul’s candidacy? I don’t know, but one could speculate that even national security hawks know a lost cause when they see one, at least when it comes to domestic politics, and they probably concluded that there was nothing to be done on behalf of such a flawed candidate as Grayson. Outside of a dedicated cadre of pundits and ideologues, many of whom remain inexplicably convinced of the war’s necessity and nobility, Paul’s opposition to the Iraq war does not automatically make him seem like an intolerable infection that must be destroyed. For a lot of “Jacksonian” hawkish Republican voters who always supported the invasion but have grown weary of the prolonged occupation, this might even recommend Paul to them as someone with superior judgment. Paul is also better than many non-interventionists at framing his opposition in terms that hawks and nationalists can understand and respect. It may befuddle Max Boot, but for every “Jacksonian” that Paul might alienate with his modest non-interventionist views he probably wins over two with his uncompromising pro-sovereignty position concerning international institutions.

Does Frum really expect conservatives to rally against Rand Paul on behalf of U.S. membership in the WTO? Even if most conservatives favor free trade (as Rand Paul does), many of them dislike ceding any control over U.S. trade policy for any reason. Does he think there are legions of die-hard defenders of the Federal Reserve just waiting for the signal to attack critics of the central bank? I understand why Frum wants conservatives to rally against Paul (he loathes people advocating a responsible, restrained foreign policy), but what position does Paul take that he thinks is so abhorrent that it would generate the kind of backlash that Bennett’s support for the bailout provoked? In fact, there doesn’t seem to be one, and that is probably what really troubles Frum.

P.S. I should add here that if a non-interventionist ever described his hawkish opponents as nothing more than trash and implied that they were an infection that needed to be wiped out, it would not be tolerated for a second. It would be roundly denounced as the vile, disgusting rhetoric that it is, and the reputation of the person responsible would be permanently damaged.

Update: Frum’s response misses the point. I don’t claim that antiwar conservatives and libertarians don’t use excessive, hyperbolic and sometimes offensive rhetoric. Obviously, many of us do, and it hasn’t helped our arguments over the years. Indeed, the dismissive reaction this excessive rhetoric has provoked in the past confirms my observation. Rhetorical excesses have made sure that we have marginalized our views as much as others have worked to marginalize them. For my part, I criticize other people harshly often enough, but I do my best to focus on their arguments. I don’t liken other people to garbage and diseases. What I was saying at the end of this post is quite simple. If the tables were turned and a non-interventionist said something like this, the rest of his argument would be dismissed automatically. The partly self-imposed marginal status of non-interventionist ideas is proof that this is correct. Meanwhile, hawks can baselessly and falsely condemn other people on the right as anti-American, unpatriotic, and would-be collaborators with the enemy, as Frum has done, and happily go about their business with no ill effects.

Rand Paul’s victory is another sign that there’s a roiling, libertarian revolt within the GOP that is likely to fuel an out-of-nowhere Dean-style “Republican-wing of the Republican party” candidate for 2012. The way Dean represented a rejection of Clintonism, this candidate will represent a rejection of Bushism. He may upset the apple cart on foreign policy the way Dean did—perhaps by calling for a pull-out from Afghanistan. ~Rich Lowry

Anything’s possible, but one reason I find this doubtful is that Lowry profoundly misunderstands what Howard Dean represented in the Democratic primaries in 2003-04. Dean did not represent a rejection of Clintonism. Dean was a relatively “centrist,” DLC-backed governor, and he was both fairly fiscally and socially moderate. When he began his long-shot presidential bid, his main issue was health care reform, and it was only as he started questioning the wisdom of continuing the Iraq war after originally supporting the invasion that he was able to tap into the energy and resources of online progressive activists. Opposition to the Iraq war in late 2003 and early 2004 was hardly proof of a “rejection of Clintonism.” If it had been, Al Gore’s speech explaining his opposition to the invasion before it happened would have also represented a rejection of something of which he was the last standard-bearer. For the most part, liberal hawks discredited themselves within their party and generally with their overwhelming support for the Iraq war, but one could still remain a liberal interventionist similar to Clinton while opposing the war. After all, Obama was just such an interventionist who objected to the Iraq war. For his part, Dean was also extremely hawkish on Iran, and repeatedly said that one of the principal reasons he opposed the Iraq war was that it was a distraction from the “real threat” Iran posed.

Dean was also running within the DLC consensus on social and cultural issues in 2004. Lowry seems to forget completely that Dean took a lot of flack for his stated interest in expanding the Democratic Party to include, as he put it, “guys with Confederate flags in their pick-up trucks.” His idea was to try to make the Democratic Party competitive nationwide, and he argued that this involved tailoring candidates to their constituents, which is more or less what the DCCC and DSCC ended up doing in the last two cycles. The idea was to minimize and downplay differences over social and cultural issues in order to appeal to working- and middle-class voters, many of them white men, who had once been Democratic voters. In many respects, Dean had a record as governor very much in the mold of Clinton himself. Stupidly, Republicans refused to distinguish between Dean and his politics and the politics of his netroots supporters and insisted on portraying Dean as a left-wing fanatic.

So the Dean comparison doesn’t work at all. In any case, the Republican equivalent to Dean would be for a reliable Bush supporter, such as Mitch Daniels or John Thune, to emerge as a zealous opponent of bailouts, unfunded liabilities, excessive executive power, and intrusive anti-terrorist measures. Except for anti-bailout rhetoric, that’s not going to happen. Could there be an “out-of-nowhere” Republican presidential candidate similar to Rand Paul in 2012? Gary Johnson is an interesting possibility, but as much as I would sympathize with a Johnson candidacy I confess that I just don’t see how it goes anywhere.

Supporting withdrawal from Afghanistan is not likely to energize nearly as many activists and voters in the GOP as supporting an end to the Iraq war energized Democratic activists and voters. For one thing, the Obama administration may already be well on its way to withdrawing many U.S. forces by the time primary voting begins. There will be minimal advantage in the Republican primaries to be the candidate who proposes to do what Obama is already doing. There will be much more of an advantage for the hawkish candidates that demagogue Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan and foreign policy generally. I’m glad Rand Paul won and I think he’ll make a good Senator, but even Paul made a rather embarrassing attack on Obama’s “apologizing for America” during his victory speech. Almost all of the incentives in the party and movement are still on the side of fairly shameless demagoguery on foreign policy.

A depressing truth about the enduring power of Bushism is that Bushism satisfies most of the major factions in the party in one way or another. During the last primary contest, McCain represented the general continuation of Bushism, and both Romney and Huckabee were basically presenting themselves as adherents of Bushism who also had executive experience. All signs right now point to a 2012 field that offers the same choices.

Confirming the observation I was making earlier today about the unpopularity of the GOP and PA-12, Tom Jensen writes:

Barack Obama’s mid-30s approval rating in the district got more ink, but the number that may have ended up being even more relevant to last night’s outcome was the putrid 22% approval rating for Congressional Republicans with 60% disapproving of them [bold mine-DL]. Given that our final survey overestimated GOP performance in the district it’s entirely possible that actual support for the Republican leadership in Washington is under 20%.

This helps to clarify that the GOP as a whole remains wildly unpopular in PA-12 despite the district’s nominally pro-Republican PVI rating after McCain won it. That is an important qualification when discussing how plausible Republican success really was in this district. It also shows that it is not enough for the GOP to find districts where voters reject Obama and his agenda. One has to find districts where voters also are not still even more strongly anti-Republican. Whatever else we might say about Republican strategy, vulnerable Democrats in traditionally Republican districts, and all the rest of it, as long as Congressional Republican approval ratings and GOP favorability are even worse than the Democrats’ ratings it may not make much difference what Republicans do or what districts they target. Nonetheless, this does underscore how important it is for Republican candidates to differentiate themselves from the Congressional GOP if they are going to prevail. In many parts of the country, the Republican brand is still toxic and being tied to it is a political disaster, and so far every House special election candidate that has identified himself with it has lost. One reason why Scott Brown was successful in the Massachusetts Senate race was his emphasis on his independence and his repeated efforts to keep distance between himself and Republicans in Washington.

Glen Bolger declares that the recent election results represent the “death of independence,” but that’s very wrong. Critz flourished by running as a candidate not tied to his party leaders, Sestak ran against the party machine’s preferred candidate, and obviously Rand Paul did much the same. For that matter, Lincoln hasn’t lost yet, and Specter became an extremely reliable vote for Reid once Sestak declared for the primary. As far as I can see, there were no independent-minded politicians being voted down in recent weeks. Even Bob Bennett did not really lose because he “strayed from the party line.” Bennett perceived errors were committed at a time when making those errors was considered evidence of being an effective partisan (i.e., crafting a Republican alternative on health care) and, in the case of the TARP, a loyal supporter of the party line. Bennett’s biggest problem was that the party line moved after Obama’s election. Two years ago, support for the TARP was virtually mandatory for any leading Republican officeholder, and all “serious” Republicans had to vote for it. Whether it was popular or not, the Republican Senate leadership lined up three-quarters of their members behind it. Pro-TARP Republicans can defend their support if they want, but they can’t claim that it was because of their willingness to break party ranks. The only way that the TARP eventually passed in the teeth of so much popular outrage was the willingness of most members of Congress in both parties to do as they were told and vote for it.

But to be fair to Rand Paul, there’s a lot of distance between Rand Paul’s agenda, which isn’t exactly mine, and the caricature of nativism or isolationism. ~Bill Kristol

What Kristol failed to say here is that the “caricature of nativism and isolationism” is a caricature drawn by people like Bill Kristol. The reality is that there isn’t that much distance between Rand Paul’s agenda and the agenda of people who have been routinely denounced as nativists and isolationists by mainstream conservatives for decades. That doesn’t mean that Rand Paul is actually close to “nativism” or “isolationism,” but rather that many of the people who admire and support him don’t subscribe to these things, either. These have been misrepresentations circulated by pro-immigration and hawkish foreign policy conservatives for a very long time. Properly speaking, isolationism does not exist and has never existed, and it is a pejorative label applied indiscriminately to almost anyone who prefers not entering into unnecessary foreign wars. Support for immigration restrictions is not in itself nativist, though it has regularly been treated that way by Republican administrations and party leadership. Bush spent an inordinate amount of time denouncing these basically non-existent tendencies in American politics as a way of deflecting attention from his own extraordinary policy failures and blunders.

The time was when someone espousing Rand Paul’s views would be pilloried and attacked by mainstream conservatives with even greater intensity after a strong electoral showing. The difference in treatment this time has to do with the fact that Paul will be just one Senator among forty-odd Republicans, and so his primary win doesn’t frighten his critics nearly as much as it would if he were to mount a credible presidential bid. It could also be that there is a growing recognition on the part of people who tried to defeat Paul that he represents a sizeable part of the GOP in many ways and that they don’t want to be on the wrong side of this constituency.

Perhaps the most unpersuasive spin on the PA-12 race I have seen comes from John McCormack:

The only competitive statewide primary Tuesday was on the Democratic side, and that helped boost Democratic turnout (Dems outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 at the polls in PA-12). That advantage will be gone in the fall. Critz ran as a conservative Democrat–his ads portrayed him as a pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, anti-cap & trade candidate, who would have voted against Obamacare. That’s an advantage many Democratic incumbents in GOP-leaning districts won’t have in November. Their voting records will tell a different story.

I keep seeing references to the “Sestak effect” to explain why Critz won, as if it is a one-time fluke that Joe Sestak was on the ballot yesterday and this will never be repeated. In the fall, Sestak will be facing Pat Toomey in the general election, and it is far from certain that Toomey is going to win a statewide race in a state that has been trending Democratic and where the Republican Party’s numbers have been shrinking in recent years. This race will be a high-profile contest and both parties are going to be making significant efforts to get out the vote. All other things being equal, that probably gives the edge to Sestak. With Sestak on the ballot again in the fall, many of the people who turned out for Critz yesterday will likely show up again. Indeed, probably more Democratic voters will show up in PA-12 for the general election than in the primary, which would reinforce Critz’s advantages. This increase isn’t some kind of trick: turnout always goes up in the general election.

It’s true that Critz campaigned against many of the major legislative items supported by his party’s leadership. Dozens of Blue Dogs in the Democratic conference actually voted against these items. These are mostly the same House members in the most vulnerable seats. There are some genuinely vulnerable Democrats, such as Harry Teague in NM-02, who voted for cap-and-trade. Teague represents the major oil-producing region of our state, so he is going to have a very hard time winning re-election, but there aren’t that many Blue Dogs like Harry Teague. There were 44 Democratic nay votes on that bill, and among them one finds some of the most vulnerable conservative Democrat incumbents: Arcuri, Bright, Childers, Foster, Nye, as well as now-defeated or retired incumbents such as Mollohan, Tanner, and Berry whose replacements are unlikely to identify closely with the administration’s agenda. Indeed, the new West Virginia Democratic nominee Oliverio is even more relatively conservative than was Mollohan. Many of the Blue Dogs likewise voted against the health care bill. Bright, Childers, Kratovil, Markey, Teague, and Minnick were among the nay votes. There are nine Democratic incumbents right there that can credibly distance themselves from Obama and their party leadership as necessary, and they are among the twenty most-vulnerable incumbents. If they can protect themselves against a backlash by campaigning as Critz did, that takes away some of the most promising targets for Republican pick-ups.

There are Democratic incumbents that have put themselves on the wrong side of their district’s voters with some important votes, but there are not as many of them as some on the right seem to think and there are not nearly enough to facilitate a Republican takeover.

Ross:

And crank or no, Paul won in Kentucky on the merits, out-hustling, out-organizing, and out-arguing a Republican establishment that took a solid candidate in Grayson and sent him to the hustings with a lazy caricature of a Bush-era national security message [bold mine-DL].

Ross links to this story showing one of Grayson’s ads, which mentions Paul’s opposition to the PATRIOT Act and a statement in which he articulates the argument for blowback as a cause of terrorism. These are perfectly reasonable positions, and outside the Republican hawkish bubble they would hardly be controversial now. The ad mentions these things as if they are supposed to be shocking and “strange,” which I’m sure Grayson and his allies think they are, but how were Grayson’s attacks a caricature of a Bush-era national security message? One might say that the Republican national security message during the Bush Era seemed like the caricature of a real policy view, but that is too easy.

Grayson was simply adopting the standard arguments for privileging any and all anti-terrorist measures over constitutional protections, and he was in complete denial that U.S. policies have any role in provoking, radicalizing or inciting violence against American and allied targets. I’m not going to say that Grayson ran a good campaign, because he clearly didn’t, but a crucial part of why his campaign was so bad was his obsession with Paul’s national security views and the lazy nationalist demagoguery he used to attack those views. This is not a caricature of the GOP’s Bush-era national security message–it is their message. It is a condensed version of everything Cheney, Giuliani, Santorum and other Grayson backers have said for at least the last nine years. One of the encouraging things about the Kentucky Republican Senate result is that most Republican primary voters in a very red state did not respond to this demagoguery and appeals to hawkish extremism. I am always pessimistic that rank-and-file Republicans are ever going to be willing to break with the defenders of an expansive national security and warfare state, and it would be a mistake to conclude this from Paul’s victory, but at the very least Paul’s landslide victory suggests that there are things that matter far more to party regulars.

A large part of the reason why Grayson’s attacks failed was that fiscal and economic issues loomed large in this race, which made Grayson’s obsession with Paul’s other views seem not only irrelevant but another sign that he, as the establishment’s preferred candidate, was wildly out of touch with what mattered to the electorate right now. It is fitting that Santorum was one of his endorsers, as he ran a very Santorum-like campaign with a similarly poor result. Four years ago, Santorum decided for some reason to make foreign policy alarmism and super-hawkish views into the core of his re-election campaign in a year when the public had already turned against the Iraq war and economic insecurity and anxiety were growing concerns. One could have said that Santorum was otherwise a solid candidate who was saddled with a “lazy caricature” of Bush-era national security views, but that would not be true. Santorum embraced those views, and if they resembled a caricature it was because he made them that way. While he did not spend quite as much time warning against the dire Venezuelan menace, the same was true with Grayson. Perhaps most strange of all, Grayson seems to have thought that voters were going to be deeply concerned that Paul was a libertarian in the wake of a financial crisis and recession that most Republican voters view as being caused in no small part by unwise government policies and decisions.

Grayson’s failure is interesting for another reason. The national Republican leadership and quite a few conservative pundits and bloggers have convinced themselves that excessive spending and government expansion were the things that drove the public away from the GOP, and this is not at all true. Nonetheless, when a primary candidate appeared who made an argument for strong fiscal conservatism and opposition to bailouts, much of the party establishment worked to try to defeat him. If the spending argument were correct, Paul would be an ideal candidate for the fall and the party leadership ought to have rallied around him. In refusing to do so and in actively working to defeat Paul, Grayson’s backers have made clear that they don’t actually put much stock in their own anti-spending rhetoric, and they have reminded everyone that their aggressive, ruinous views on national security take precedence over everything else.

Special elections give the party out of favor more opportunities to buck the national tide than they will have when all 435 seats are up in November. That is not to say that repeated losses shouldn’t temper Republican triumphalism — after all, they indicate that even in this tough environment there is a path to victory for Democrats in the kind of districts Republicans need to win to retake the majority. But it won’t be as easy to replicate these one-off successes when the entire House is up for re-election this fall unless the national political climate changes [bold mine-DL]. ~Jim Antle

One of the things that ought to temper Republican triumphalism is the recognition that it is their party that is still the party more out of favor with most of the public. This is something that I don’t think a lot of conservatives and Republican fully appreciate: voters have a more unfavorable view of the GOP than they have of Democrats. The difficulty for the GOP is that Republicans have been losing special House elections when the Democrats have been riding high in 2007, 2008 and early 2009 and when the Democrats have been struggling and losing support in late 2009 and now. When presented with golden opportunities to take advantage of a smaller, more engaged electorates to pick up House seats, they have failed every time. Part of this is the failed nationalizing strategy I discussed yesterday, but another part is the mistaken assumption that the public rejected the GOP because of excessive spending and all that the party has to do to win them back is to declare their hostility to all forms of new spending. Republicans have spent the last sixteen months addressing a grievance that most of the voters who turned against them in the last four years do not have.

Let’s remember how many activists and pundits enthused over Jim Ogonowski’s better-than-expected showing in his loss to Nikki Tsongas three years ago as a sign of imminent Republican revival, or at least a “reversion to the norm.” One of the people making that argument was Patrick Ruffini, he of the 70-seat 2010 “gut” prediction. Ruffini said in late 2007: “2006 was a killing field. 2007-8 is not.” This was impressively wrong. Regarding Senate elections, 2008 was even worse. Conservative activists and pundits have consistently overestimated Republican chances during bad cycles and many have grossly overestimated their chances in better cycles, which is why I find it hard to take seriously arguments that it is now no problem that an election so many on the right were saying was neck-and-neck and a possible pick-up turned out to be something of a blowout for the other party. Like the absurd predictions of huge Republican gains in the fall, it was always pretty unreasonable to think that Burns had a chance of winning in a district as heavily Democratic as PA-12, but that didn’t stop a lot of people on the right from talking up Burns’ chances as if they were realistic.

This is a significant problem for Republicans: they continually set unrealistic expectations of success and naturally cannot meet them, and then they are forced to explain away the “failure” to achieve the impossible that they should have never claimed they could achieve. That doesn’t mean that PA-12 was not a “must-have” win. Just as everything had to go right for the Democrats to pick up all the seats that they did in 2006 and 2008, absolutely everything has to go right for the Republicans to win control of the House, and that includes winning seats in traditionally Democratic territory when those seats are open and the district’s voters are strongly against the administration. So far, that isn’t happening.

It would equally be a mistake to overinterpret a special election result in a district that Democrats should have won all along, but special elections should help the party that gains the most advantage from lower turnout. That party is the Republican Party. These are elections in which Republican candidates have their best chance to steal seats that they normally have no business contesting, and they aren’t getting it done. Antle mentions that the DCCC will not be able to devote as many resources and people to every competitive race as they devoted to PA-12, and that’s true, but it’s equally true for the NRCC, which continues to trail its Democratic counterpart in fundraising and cash on hand.

This race should serve notice to Democratic officeholders everywhere that no seat is safe and that voters will not accept business-as-usual. ~Michael Steele

PA 12 simplified: GOP tried to nationalize the race. Health care, Obama, etc. Democrats localized it (and the Dem candidate ran against Obama). And the DCCC put 200 people on the ground there in the last week. Meaning: Dems can be competitive in races if they run the right candidates the right way. And Republicans aren’t gonna cruise to victory in the fall. ~Marc Ambinder

There are many things about the PA-12 special election that are unique to that race and district, but one thing that ties it to many of the other Republican special election losses over the last three years is the party’s obsession with nationalizing House races that might have conceivably been won by appealing to local issues and concerns. In NY-23 we saw Hoffman scoffing at “parochial” issues, and in NY-20 Tedisco ran a disastrously bad campaign that frittered away all of his advantages as a well-liked local representative and re-made himself into a robot repeating the national party’s message. Before that we saw several failed attempts in IL-14, MS-01 and elsewhere to run against “Pelosi-Reid,” when the real competition came in the form of effective candidates with strong local connections. As I said last year in connection with the NY-23 race:

Something I don’t understand about the national GOP’s elevation of the NY-23 race to such a high profile is why they think nationalizing House races favors them. Nationally, the GOP remains toxic and its party ID continues to be very low. Nationalizing the race gains the GOP nothing in a traditionally supportive district, but it potentially saddles their preferred candidate with all of their baggage from the past several years. It is also mimicking the absolutely failed Republican tactics of almost every special election of the last three years. With depressing regularity, GOP attack ads have warned voters against such-and-such a candidate siding with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, when most people outside of Washington don’t know and couldn’t care who these people are.

There are two major problems with the Republican approach to these House elections. The first is that they tend to ignore or dismiss the interests of the specific district where they are competing in order to make a statement about national party agendas. The national GOP wants these elections to be mandates against Pelosi/Reid’s agenda or Obama’s agenda, and the Democratic committees and party leadership are more concerned with winning the election contests. The second problem is that they don’t seem to understand that even in districts where Obama is not particularly popular and where most voters did not support him in 2008, such as PA-12, most voters are not interested in vindicating a pre-scripted anti-Obama narrative. So long as the Democratic candidates can present them with a more appealing message of continued government funding and the promise of economic support, they are not automatically going to rally behind the candidates of the more unpopular, discredited party.

Obviously, Steele has to spin a loss in a potentially winnable open seat as best as he can. The reality is that the NRCC sank $1 million in a district carried narrowly by McCain and no longer represented by a veteran Congressman and the GOP candidate managed to win a little over 44% of the vote in a low-turnout special election. That is slightly better than the Republican nominee Russell did in 2008 in a much smaller electorate that ought to have favored the Republican. Burns and Critz will face each other again in November, but it will be that much harder to dislodge Critz once he is a member of the House. Far from showing that no seat is safe, it showed that when it came time to deliver on overblown predictions of massive Republican gains this year the GOP failed. I don’t expect Republican leaders to announce this to the world, but if they are to have any chance of coming close to their goals of winning back the House they have to contest House elections differently than they have been doing over the last few years.

P.S. Nagourney reports on the special election:

Tom Davis, a former Republican House member and top party campaign strategist, saw the win by Democrat Mark Critz, a former aide to Mr. Murtha, over Republican Tim Burns as a serious blow to the Republican claim to be within reach of the 40 seats needed to recapture the House.

“If you can’t win a seat that is trending Republican in a year like this, then where is the wave?” asked Mr. Davis, who said Republicans will need to examine what went wrong. “It would be a huge upset not to win this seat.”