NOTE: This diary is adapted/expanded from a comment I made yesterday, in this thread
It's more than a year away, but it already looks like the biggest political battle of 2006 will be for the Pennsylvania Senate seat currently held by the odious Rick Santorum, R-Extremism.
Here on dKos, the battle for the Democratic nomination to oppose Santorum is already joined, with partisans for PA state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. duking it out with the probably more numerous and certainly more enthusiastic backers of Chuck Pennacchio, the Philadelphia-area professor and campaign veteran who's running a Paul Wellstone-style insurgent effort against Casey, the choice of the PA Democratic establishment. A handful of diaries over the last several weeks and months have chronicled different aspects of both the primary and general election contest.
This race is interesting to me for a lot of reasons. I'm a native Philadelphian; I've known for years that I'll give as much money, time and skill as I possibly can to beat Santorum; Paul Wellstone is the public figure I've admired most in my lifetime; and the contest seems illustrative of just how large the gap remains between "the net roots" and the party's traditional leadership. It's also going to be a great litmus test for whether Democrats of different stripes can renounce their usual circular firing squad and unite against a public official we all really loathe--or whether single-issue absolutism will divide us yet again and work to keep that loathsome fellow in office.
Conventional wisdom, and objective analysis, would seem to hold that Casey is the much stronger candidate. He's the son of a well-regarded governor, is himself arguably the most popular politician in PA, will have no problem raising money, is an ally of Governor Ed Rendell (who's also on the ballot next year and is expected to win), and--like it or not--will have an easier time connecting with the social conservative voters between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh who almost tipped the state to Bush last year. By contrast, Pennacchio starts with no name recognition, no money, no experience in office, and an ideology that would seem to present a "target-rich environment" for a sharp-elbowed politician like Santorum who's well versed in the politics of division and fear.
On the other hand, he's a dream candidate for grass-roots progressives. I haven't found one issue where I personally disagree with him--I might be a bit more hawkish than he is on foreign policy, but that's a distinction of degree only--and he seems to live his beliefs, and, importantly, he's one of us. Hell, he posts here. He's already pledged to give the net roots substantial "ownership" of his campaign.
The dilemma for progressives is this: a Pennacchio win next year, though seemingly much less likely than a Casey victory, would be much sweeter. A Casey victory, though easier to imagine, would quite probably leave a lot of Democrats upset at the new Senator's positions on abortion and other social issues. The problem is how to determine the calculus of a smaller probability of a great outcome, against the larger probability of a good outcome.
There's also a plausibility aspect to all this. Pennacchio advocates base their case on the idea that an appeal to the "better angels" of the voters--the idealism that Pennacchio himself expresses very eloquently--will trump negativity and the politics of fear, even if the latter has a 10-to-1 money advantage.
As much as I'd like to believe this, the course of the past 11 years of American politics has disabused me of this notion. And this is why, though my heart is with Pennacchio, my head at this point tells me that Casey is the man for this job.
2006 will likely be a year in which voter discontent with Republican extremism and lack of governing results should be high. Democrats can beat Santorum by pointing out his extremism and ineptitude. Running a candidate like Pennacchio, though, opens up the strategy for the Republicans of attacking the Democratic nominee's own "extremism," as it's likely to be perceived by the social conservatives in a hundred little towns in central PA--not to mention his lack of governing experience.
Pennacchio seems like a truly compelling candidate and I'd love to see him in office. Ironically, I think he'd be an ideal candidate to run against a less vulnerable opponent; the stakes wouldn't be as high, and campaigns like his seem to engender lifetime commitments to citizen activism that might bear fruit in 10 or 20 years' time. But I don't think 2006 is the year, nor the U.S. Senate his likely landing point. He's not an old guy; I think he's 45. Why not put his political/campaign experience to use in running for a state or local office, build up something of a record, and think about Congress next year or in 2008, or the Senate in 2010, when Specter likely will retire?
Idealism of the sort that seems to fuel the Pennacchio campaign is sweet in how it appeals to the best within us as progressives. The death of Paul Wellstone left a void that we all ache to see filled. But that same idealism goes sour in how such appeals almost always seem to go unanswered in the current politics of the lowest common denominator, leaving us ever more isolated and alienated in our own country.