A party without core beliefs beyond electability

NY Times:

Listening to Congressional candidates in middle Georgia, it is easy for someone to think that he is in a different year and, possibly, a different country.

Democrats defend themselves against accusations that they are rubber stamps for their party’s leadership. Democrats are defending the war in Iraq. And Democrats — yes, Democrats — strive to align themselves with the president.

“I agree with George Bush on this one,” Representative John Barrow ends his new advertisement in favor of abolishing the estate tax.

Charles S. Bullock, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, said, “It’s a bit of a return to yesterday.”

For all the talk of this being a Democratic year — experts and party leaders use words like tide or even tsunami — there are a small number of exceptions, places where Republicans believe they can take back seats from the Democrats.

And these contests are producing some of the fiercest fights — not to mention the most contrarian campaign strategies — of the midterm elections, as Democrats try to boast of their conservative credentials and their opponents try to sequester them on the opposite extreme.

As Mr. Barrow’s Republican challenger, Max Burns, declared on Thursday in a debate in Augusta, “My opponent, he started out a liberal and he’s trying to get to the right of Attila the Hun.”

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“I’m spending a lot more time with Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton on TV in middle Georgia than I will ever in my life spend in reality,” Mr. Marshall said.

At a pizza and politics rally at a church in Covington, a town west of Atlanta, Mr. Collins listed familiar bogeymen from the left, Representatives John Conyers Jr., Charles B. Rangel and John P. Murtha.

“And last but not least, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi from California wants to be speaker of the House,” he said, his voice low and ominous. “And I tell you, folks, this is the last thing we need in the House.

“The next two years bogged down in investigations, with a judiciary chairman who wants to impeach the president. We don’t need those things, folks. So I ask you now, on Nov. 7, vote for Mac Collins to be your congressman. Mac Collins doesn’t vote that way. Mac Collins will vote for Denny Hastert, a Republican, to be speaker of the House.”

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“If you vote for Barrow, you are giving a vote to Nancy Pelosi,” Joan Clay, a Republican, said at the debate in Augusta. “Do you want Nancy Pelosi to be the majority leader?”

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Why would any conservative vote for a candidate who is going to vote for Pelosi for Speaker? That is the question that should be put to every voter ina District where a Democrat says he is conservative. What these races really show is that Democrats will say anything to get elected so that they can vote for Pelosi.