Paul Davis, Kansas' Democratic candidate for governor, is, as E.J. Dionne explains, exploiting the rift between his conservative state's conservatives and the nation's radicals in the most logical fashion possible, and so far it's translating into success. Most polls have shown Davis ahead of Sam Brownback, because ...
The choice Davis is offering is not between liberalism and conservatism but rather between two kinds of conservatism: the deeply anti-government tea party kind, and an older variety that values prudence and fiscal restraint but also expects government to provide, as Davis put it, "the basic services that are essential to the state’s vitality."
Some of us on the left--including some, such as myself, who are farther leftward than Dionne--have urged this perfectly reasonable as well as arrestingly obvious strategy for years. It's deployment, however, has been exasperatingly meager.
If you're a Democrat running for office in a uniformly Republican state, you are, in reality, facing a deeply divided electorate: authentic Republican conservatives vs. Palinite Republican reactionaries. Ordinarily the two factions unite behind the Republican candidate (commonly a reactionary, since his faction disproportionately votes in primaries) in the general election because the conservative faction has nowhere else to go; the Democratic candidate may not openly be touting liberalism, but he or she sure isn't selling genuine conservatism--"prudence and fiscal restraint" admixed with responsible governance, as Dionne summarizes it--either.
Paul Davis has seen that reality, and smartly engaged it. He offers himself as the gubernatorial race's authentic conservative who's doing battle with modern Republicanism's decidedly anticonservative radicalism. He reminds just enough conservatives what conservatism once meant, fusing them and their traditionalist beliefs with his own centrist and center-left Democratic base into a pragmatic majority. And that, as they say, is the way it's done.
Yet leftward resistance has proved itself durable, encased as it is, metaphorically, in The Maddow Problem. Progressives are boldly and proudly idealistic and above all right, say the left's Maddows, and they should soil themselves not with ideological compromises. My most unforgettable (and less metaphorical) moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was that of the MSNBC host interviewing Sen. Obama--rather, lecturing Sen. Obama as to everything he was doing wrong; that is, he was coming up progressively short. After delivering her laundry list of disgruntlement, Obama simply replied, "But Rachel, we're winning."
That, for Rachel, wasn't good enough. In her implicit view, voters should be beaten, berated, and dragged to progressivism's ideological rectitude. If they still resist, then fuck 'em. Someday they'll see the light, but till then, ideologically unflinching defeats trump strategically pragmatic victories.
Sound familiar? It should. It's precisely what's bringing down Sam Brownback's Republicanism.