Say what you will about the batsh%$ insane wing of the Republican Party, but unlike liberals who seem to invest all their hopes in the Presidential primary they managed to take control of the party:

But the huge reaction to Scheiber’s piece just reminds me that ever since Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Jimmy Carter – maybe since Gene McCarthy’s insurgency, followed by Bobby Kennedy’s, convinced Lyndon Johnson not to seek re-election in 1968 – progressives have been over-invested in finding a primary campaign vehicle for their hopes and dreams. And until Barack Obama came along, that hadn’t worked out very well.

Even Obama’s emergence is a cautionary tale for Warren backers, because I’d argue that investing the freshman Illinois senator with magic progressive properties was a bad bet. He was never more progressive, ironically, than Hillary Clinton, except maybe on Iraq – and his national security policies can’t make any of his anti-war, pro-civil-liberties backers comfortable that they did the right thing.

Joan Walsh, the author, misses the point here: Obama was never in the remotest sense a progressive.

He lied in 2008, which is yet another reason why liberals play a suckers game by investing too much effort in the primaries.

If you take down an sitting President of your own party, the electoral consequences down ticket are huge.

If you pick off Representatives, and state reps, and board of ed members, and everything including dog catcher, in the primaries, as the (thoroughly repulsive) Club for Growth did, you get results, and these people become front runners when a Senator’s seat opens up, and eventually the bench from where candidates are selected becomes more in line with your ideology.

BTW, while we are at this, don’t give to the DCCC. As Down With Tyranny has repeatedly documented, the Democratic Party in general, and DCCC chair Steve Israel in particular, are determined to reconstruct the Blue Dog caucus, even if it results in fewer seats for the Dems.