The key rule in American politics is that there are no rules anymore. Any politician run ning for re-election, or seeking election as his party’s anointed one, who faces any kind of a credible challenger, finds himself in history’s crosshairs.
Arlen Specter, the five-term senator in Pennsylvania, had his career euthanized in ignominy last night after fleeing his original party, the GOP, last year to find safe harbor with Democrats whose rank-and-file tossed him over the side as soon as they were allowed.
At this writing, it appeared that Blanche Lincoln, the two-term Democratic senator in Arkansas, would be forced into a primary run-off that will probably seal her doom in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Rand Paul, an insurgent Republican in Kentucky’s Senate primary, crushed the preferred candidate of GOP regulars with the force of a steamroller.
All this followed hard upon the defeat last week in West Virginia’s Democratic primary of Alan Mollohan, a long-serving and wealthy congressman. That came a few days after the unprecedented dumping of Utah’s three-term US senator, Robert Bennett, at the state’s Republican convention. Which came a week after a popular former senator limped into his party’s nomination for an open Senate seat with just 40 percent of the vote — prevailing only because two more unconventional candidates split the remaining 60 percent.
Just before that, David Obey, the immensely powerful Democratic head of the House Appropriations Committee, ended his re-election effort after 41 years in office (yes, I said 41 years in office) once he saw the writing on the wall.
The electoral year that began in January with Republican Scott Brown’s staggering victory in the Senate race for Teddy Kennedy’s seat in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts is nowhere near done with us yet — or with them.
What is happening in the 2010 elections goes far beyond the conventional interpretations. Yes, voters are expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo. Yes, conservatives are displaying anger with runaway liberalism and what they perceive as accommodationism. Yes, populists are using their primary votes or special-election votes to stick it to the elites.
None of that gets at the central fact with which all American politicians will be forced to grapple going forward: The era of political stability for incumbents and veteran political players has truly reached its end.
The point is not that every incumbent is vulnerable — certainly Chuck Schumer isn’t — but that every incumbent might be.
The threat might come, as it did to congressional Republicans in 2006 and 2008, from Democrats taking advantage of voter exhaustion with the GOP in districts and states that should have been safe conservative territory. Or it might come, as it has over the past month, from within the incumbent’s party itself.
If Bob Bennett can be ousted in Utah and Alan Mollohan can be ousted in West Virginia — in their own party’s primaries in seats they not only they held for decades, but that their fathers held in turn before them, in states noted for the relative docility of their party’s internal electorate — then anything can happen.
In this respect, Joe Lieberman’s 2006 loss to Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary was not just a result of leftist disaffection with Lieberman’s pro-war voting record. It was an early indication of a profound change in American politics made possible by a confluence of events — the technological revolution in fund-raising and attention-gathering made possible by the Internet and the greater degree of passion and participation in politics by voters who are driven more by ideology than by partisanship.
That revolution is only going to be enhanced by the Supreme Court’s determination earlier this year that much of the architecture of campaign-finance “reform” — which is designed almost explicitly to limit the ability of outsiders to target incumbents — is unconstitutional.
This is all new, and is sure to lead to unexpected, confusing and doubtless distressing consequences — as I fear a successful Rand Paul candidacy might. But we have entered a new era of political accountability, and that is to be welcomed and celebrated.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary and a former Post editorial-page editor.