Rhode Island Senate primary: a beginner's guide

OK folks, I want to use the limited power I have as proprietor of Internal Monologue to raise the profile of the Republican Senate primary in the tiny state of Rhode Island. I'm writing this with an eye to people who haven't been following this story, so I apologize to those of you for whom a lot of this is repetition.

Here's how I see it: The incumbent senator up for re-election in November is the moderate Republican (to the extent that anyone who caucuses with the Republicans can be said to be moderate these days) Lincoln Chafee.

The right wing doesn't care for him much. Republican bloggers, activists, and the Club for Growth (Grover Norquist's right wing "cut taxes at any cost and defecits be damned" organization) think he's too cozy with Democrats, not supportive enough of Bush, or not fanatical enough in his advocacy of tax giveaways to the extraordinarily wealthy. So they're running a challenger to him: Steve Laffey.

In some ways, it's like a mirror image of what happened in nearby Connecticut, with Lieberman analogous to Chafee and Lamont's insurgent role taken by right-wing Laffey.

But there's an important difference in the Rhode Island situation: Connecticut is a very blue state, so the winner of the Democratic primary could reasonably expect to defeat the hapless Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger. (Anyone interested in some tactical Lamont advocacy should give the guy a hand, as he will syphon votes away from Lieberman). Rhode Island, however, is also a blue state. The winner of the Republican senate primary will face an enormous challenge in the November general election. The only reason Chafee has a good chance to get re-elected as a Republican is because of his moderate stances (and because voters don't understand that in the era of partisan politics, your party affiliation and the agendas of the parties matter far more than an individual senator's stance on issues).

If Laffey defeats Chafee in the Republican primary, the Democratic candidate Sheldon Whitehouse:will have a much easier time of winning in Dem-friendly Rhode Island. So the Republican establishment is throwing enormous weight behind incumbent Lincoln Chafee. At the same time, the right-wing blogosphere is fighting that establishment and backing their guy, Laffey. Jane Hamsher on Firedoglake (whom I found via Atrios) spells out the difference in the CT and RI situations:

Anyway, the joke is that the GOP is coming apart at the seams now over the race. Steve Laffey is the wrong-o-sphere’s candidate of choice, and now the GOP is marching into Rhode Island with millions to save Chafee’s ass. I guess nobody on the right cared about the practicalities of the matter like those of us on the left did — we didn’t launch a challenge in a state where the Republican stood any chance of defeating a Democratic nominee even after a contentious primary. If anyone in the media ever gets over their fixation on us as dirty urchins, maybe they can acknowledge that.

Still, I have to say I respect wingy blogs for standing up to the Republican party for once; usually they just function and another part of the right wing echo-chamber with no message (and no power) of their own, hence much of their irrelevance. And even though Mike Krempasky’s post about Liddy Dole smacks of "get back in the kitchen and bake me a pie," and I understand that Dole is in a bind (Laffey would probably get killed by Whitehouse, Chafee is the only Republican who stands a chance,) — I’ve actually got to hand it to them for pitching a fit in the situation. They’ve got their guy, they believe in him, he’s being attacked by vicious and aburdly racist ads by the NRSC (go figure) and they’re saying "enough."

(Emphasis mine.) So the RI senate primary could really be the place where righty blogs declare their independence of the Republican establishment. It could also be the place where they hand a Senate seat to the Democrats. We'll have to check back on this race often to see how things shape up. Atrios points out that the media isn't leaping on this like they lept on Lamont-Lieberman. Apparently, Republican intra-party spats aren't as interesting to them as Democratic ones:

When I was in Connecticut I tried to kid a NYT reporter by asking if they were going to devote as much attention to the Rhode Island race as they did to the Connecticut race. I got a somewhat confused look, and then in a response a question about how Matthew Brown was doing.

Matthew Brown dropped out of the Democratic primary race in April.

Well, Republican intra-party spats are very interesting to me, and you can bet I'll be keeping an eye on this one.