Will this hurt U.S. efforts down the road when, at some unforeseen moment, Washington needs Ankara or Brasilia? Perhaps. But that’s the point: A multi-polar world doesn’t guarantee a less divisive one where everyone gets along and hugs out their problems. Quite the contrary. ~Kevin Sullivan

The real difference between a multipolar world and a bipolar or unipolar one is that many more states are now able to pursue their interests openly and independently. While most states had to align themselves to varying degrees with one of the two superpowers during the Cold War, and most states accepted U.S. leadership in the ’90s even when it did not necessarily suit their particular interests, many of the rising powers no longer feel compelled to follow the lead of U.S. and other Western governments. There was a time when no Turkish civilian government would have risked being seen as antagonistic to Washington for any reason, and there was a time when Brazil was so preoccupied with its own internal problems that it would not have expended any energy on affairs on the other side of the world, but Washington can’t count on reflexive Turkish obedience and Brazilian passivity, just as it can’t count on automatic Japanese support or “slavish” British loyalty anymore.

The problem is that this is hardly the first time that Turkey in particular has been treated shabbily by the U.S. I make no excuses for Erdogan’s penchant for demagoguery and whipping up crowds against other countries, but it is important to understand that he is able to do this because Turks feel neglected and ill-used as allies and most of them recoil from U.S. and Israeli policies in their neighborhood. We exhausted whatever reserve of goodwill towards the U.S. existed in Turkey with the Iraq war, and our government has done precious little to repair the damage that has been done. In the meantime, Turkish politics has changed permanently and isn’t going to return to the Kemalist-dominated system of the past. This isn’t another lament about how Turkey has been “lost” to the West or has become too Islamist. Washington fails to appreciate how useful a more openly Islamist Turkish government can be in mediating disputes and negotiations for the U.S. and other allies, and it jeopardizes the long-term health of the alliance if it insists on making the AK government in Turkey into an obstacle to better relations. Instead of recognizing that Turkey is now ideally placed as a U.S. ally with credibility throughout the region, Washington has opted for dismissing and insulting them instead. And for what? A round of sanctions that most observers agree will do nothing to change Iranian behavior? This is folly.

On a related point, the British coalition government released its proposed agenda yesterday. The foreign affairs section is mosty pretty bland, but there were a few interesting items. In addition to promising a “frank” relationship with the United States, which is in keeping with the rhetoric of both Cameron and Clegg, the government there proposed working towards reform of the Security Council to bring many of the world’s other major powers in as permanent members. They mentioned India, Japan, Germany and Brazil as new permanent members, as well as proposing a seat to represent Africa. Sooner or later, this kind of reform at the U.N. will have to happen or the organization will lose a lot of whatever credibility it still has, as I discuss at greater length in my column this week. Just imagine how different and probably more constructive the debate over Iran sanctions would be if all of these permanent members were already on the Council.

This is not because an expanded Security Council wouldn’t mean less divisiveness and disagreement, and that is exactly why expanding the Council would be valuable, especially when it comes to contentious international issues such as Iran’s nuclear program. The P-5 are pretending that they embody some sort of global consensus, but they don’t and haven’t for decades. Even two of the permanent members don’t really care very much for this new round of sanctions, and until earlier this week Russia was actively encouraging Turkey and Brazil to follow through with this deal. Outside of these states, there are very few that actually care to impose sanctions on Iran. What annoys Washington about what Turkey and Brazil have done is that it exposes this phony consensus for what it is, and it shows that there are credible democratic governments that take a dramatically different view of the Iranian nuclear issue. This undermines the fiction that it is the “international community” punishing Iran, and it shows that Iran is not isolated in the world, and it also shows that democracies and Iran’s authoritarian government do not automatically have to be adversaries. This is dissatisfying to many people here in the U.S. who rely on one or more of these fictions to justify our approach towards Iran.

Update: I hadn’t read this until a few minutes ago, but Leslie Gelb’s column makes many of the same points and explains very well the rest of the world’s impatience with our Iranian nuclear obsession:

In the first place, many, if not most, nations around the world simply do not feel anywhere near as threatened by Iran (or North Korea for that matter) as do the United States, Western Europe, Israel and other American allies. In private, they lift their eyes toward the ceiling when the Americans and Israelis levitate about an Iranian nuclear weapon. They just don’t believe Tehran would be stupid or self-destructive enough to launch a nuclear attack. You can even include China in this group.

This is what I have been saying for years, but I do find it encouraging that this common sense observation is catching on.

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

That picture — a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam — is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there’s no cost in lining up with America’s enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement. ~Charles Krauthammer

This prompts a laugh from Greg Scoblete. It is admittedly pretty amusing that Krauthammer expects us to believe that Turkey and Brazil are continuing to pursue the increasingly independent foreign policies they have pursued for seven or eight years because of things Obama did or did not do. Had Obama taken a harder line with all authoritarian states, changed nothing from the practices of the Bush administration, pursued a purely confrontational approach with Iran, and given speeches celebrating American hegemony, Turkey and Brazil or some other interested rising powers would have taken the initiative to insert themselves into negotiations with Iran. These states have their own interests and agendas that they are going to pursue whether or not Washington approves of them, and they will pursue them regardless of how confrontational or accommodating any particular administration is.

Iran has many trading partners that are interested in improving their relations with Iran’s government, and much of the rest of the world does not believe Iran’s nuclear program is a major threat, so it was a matter of time before our obsession with this issue would generate dissatisfaction and action from other states. Had Obama continued every Bush policy and conducted himself in the same way, he would not have delayed this from happening, and instead might have made sure that it happened almost immediately after he took office. Hegemonists believe that an assertive, aggressive U.S. abroad helps to guarantee global stability and peace. Even though I think this is mistaken in important ways, there is an even greater flaw in hegemonists’ thinking, which is the assumption that U.S. allies and non-aligned states must see these things in more or less the same way that the hegemonists do. If Turkey and Brazil try to prevent Iran from being sanctioned, the only way hegemonists can see this is as an expression of anti-American rebellion. It does not seem to occur to them that Turkey and Brazil want to preserve peace and stability in the region and simply have no confidence in going the sanctions route, which they and everyone else have seen fail time after time in numerous cases.

Turkey has been building strong ties with Iran for several years, and this rapprochement predates Obama’s time in office. Turkey has important energy interests in Iran, and wants to find a way to resolve the nuclear issue without sanctions. The Turkish government was fiercely opposed to the Iraq war, and they are likewise opposed to any confrontational policy towards Iran that could lead to another conflict. They obviously have a vested interest in stability on their borders. The Iraq war was responsible for alienating a lot of Turks from the United States and allowing Erdogan to pursue a more assertive and independent course. Brazil has been becoming a regional power with its own foreign policy agenda for some time, and Brazil is becoming more active internationally now that Lula is nearing the end of his term. Riding high at home, Lula has been taking steps in recent years to raise Brazils’ profile internationally, and this nuclear deal with Iran is just one of those efforts. Turkey and Brazil are emerging as significant powers in their own right, which would have happened regardless of what any administration following Bush did or didn’t do. Washington needs to learn how to cope with this without slapping them down and trying to humiliate them.

But these days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes. ~David Brooks

This is so misleading and offensive that I don’t quite know where to begin. There is nothing more precious and absurd than the “centrist” pretense that the political extremes dominate our politics. Please, tell progressives that they dictate the content of health care and environment policy, and tell Rand Paul’s supporters that they are the ones who influence monetary, fiscal and foreign policies. We could use a good laugh. I would expect the people with almost all of the influence and power in this country to mock and dismiss their critics as “fringe” and “kooks” and “extremists,” but it is incredible that anyone in a position of influence can seriously argue that these are the people with the political clout and importance.

This nonsense is particularly rich coming from someone who has regularly lauded virtually every establishment initiative, yearned for a “McCain-Lieberman Party” to embody fully the corrupt, warmongering, corporatist policies that “centrists” favor, and denounced the establishment’s opponents as “nihilists.” Two-thirds of Congress backed the financial sector bailout that both progressives and conservatives hated, and most mainstream media outlets and prominent pundits, including Brooks, rallied behind the forces of socialized risk and the too-big-to-fail rationale for rewarding catastrophic failure. The vote to invade Iraq was even more lopsided, and the opponents of the invasion were dismissed as lunatics and apologists for despotism or otherwise ignored. The political center has been making policy and wrecking this country for at least the last decade. Would that it had become nothing more than a “feckless shell”! Perhaps then our country would not have suffered from so many disastrous, unwise decisions.

I’m linking to this a bit late, but here is my column for The Week on Bakiyev’s overthrow in Kyrgyzstan.

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.