The Fear of God (and Voters)

My ears pricked up this weekend when I heard freshman Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) say he would support a health care reform bill even if he knew he could lose his job. How refreshing, I thought.

Jon Walker at FireDogLake provides one reason Bennet was, for a politician, so uncharacteristically unequivocal. Bennet — appointed when Ken Salazar resigned his senate seat to become Obama’s interior secretary — is facing a serious primary challenge from a former Colorado Speaker of the House, Andrew Romanoff, who announced in mid-September.

Walker observes:

Bennet claims that he will support health care reform, even if it could possibly cost him his seat, and this may well be true. But what Bennet left unsaid was that he knows opposing health care reform would definitely cost him his seat–thanks to his credible primary challenger.

We have seen the same pattern from Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania that we see from Micheal Bennet in Colorado. It is amazing how quickly a serious primary challenger turns a senator into a reliable vote on the important issues.

A week earlier on the WCQS reporter roundtable show, “Byline” [timestamp 7:15], local reporters expressed what sounded like genuine puzzlement over why Patsy Keever, a Democrat, would challenge fellow Democrat, Rep. Bruce Goforth, for House District 115. “It’s a little bit unusual for one high-profile Democrat to challenge another one in the primary,” said the Citizen-Times’ Jordan Schrader. The word unusual kept coming up.

But somewhat less unusual these days, it seems.