AK Senate Race: McAdams Endorses Murkowski?

Chicago-style politics in Alaska...

After her defeat in the GOP primary, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski jumped back into the headlines by launching a write-in campaign. Her chance of winning is almost exactly zero, but if she's lucky, she could hand the race to the Democrat.

Interestingly, in Thursday's debate between the Democrat, Scott McAdams and Joe Miller, the Tea Party Republican, McAdams had nothing but good things to say about his write-in "opponent." Is Scott McAdams' statement tantamount to an endorsement? Watch and listen:

"I welcome [Murkowski]. I think she's a classy person with a good voice. I don't think that she is a liberal, as she has been framed as being. I think she is an Alaskan first and a party person second..."

"I think it's better for Alaska if Senator Murkowski has a dialog in the room..."

"If Senator Murkowski joins this thing, I welcome her. Her (sic) and I made an oath to one another that we would have a civic (sic), principled dialog on the issues, that we wouldn't lie about each other, that we wouldn't tear each other down..."

"If she does enter [the race], I hope that either Senator Murkowski or myself (sic) are the next Senator for the State of Alaska."

[emphasis added]

Aren't McAdams and Murkowski getting a little too cozy in this race?

Lisa Murkowski says she jumped back into the race as a write-in candidate to give Alaskans "a choice." But she's not really a choice. As a write-in candidate, her only chance at a meaningful impact on the race is to siphon off enough votes to sabotage Joe Miller. Murkowski knows she's only giving the Democrat a chance to win.

This exemplifies the problem with liberal Republicans.

Lexington Green over at Chicago Boyz provides brilliant analysis by introducing the idea of the Combine

:

In Illinois, there has long been an expression which describes the relationship between the two political parties: The Combine. Chicago Tribune writer John Kass seems to have originated this expression. See, for example, this article: In Combine, cash is king, corruption is bipartisan. Kass quoted former Illinois Senator Peter Fitzgerald: “In the final analysis, The Combine’s allegiance is not to a party, but to their pocketbooks. They’re about making money off the taxpayers,” Fitzgerald said. Kass went on: “He should know. He fought The Combine and lost, and the empty suits running the Republican Party encourage their friendly scribes to blame the social conservatives for the disaster of the state GOP.”

Sound familiar?

America, welcome to Illinois.

The way it works is this. The Democrat party is the senior member of the Combine. The GOP is the junior member of the Combine. The game is exactly the same, and whoever is up, or whoever is down, based on the random behavior of those rubes, the voters, does not matter. The game is always exactly the same, and the people who are in on the game, from either party, have a shared stake in defending the game.

The Combine is a term that should be more widely used in Illinois. It is also a word that should be more widely used in the USA in general.

Lisa Murkowski’s family, and her career, exist because of the Combine. Her interest is in preserving the existing game. She is preserving her stake and her family’s stake in a game they have benefitted from. There is no mystery about this at all. There is no need for psychiatry to understand why she is trying to stop Joe Miller. He threatens the game. It has nothing to do with the label “Republican.”.

This is why the Tea Party exists...to break up the Combine.

T

oo many of our politicians would fit just as comfortably in the Democratic Party as they would in the GOP. They'll go anywhere the quest for power takes them.

The political establishment on both sides of the aisle believes that it is above the law (i.e. the Constitution); and as the fight over ObamaCare revealed, the pols hardly feel the need to concern themselves with the will of the people either.

If the past 21 months opened up any room for doubt about the fact that the GOP is free from the burdens of principle, the statist Republican leadership laid those doubts to rest last week.

Concern trolls like Karl the Cannibal demonstrated a greater fear for the threat of unapproved conservative insurgents than for the disastrous policies of their "opponents" in the other party.

T

his, in turn, confirms the fears of the grassroots: the GOP tent, as it is currently configured, is not big enough for more conservatives.

Fortunately, the cannibalism confirms something else as well. Conservatives now know with certainty that their primary season gambles were prudent, for it is better to take chances with unproven Tea Party conservatives than to go with consistently untrustworthy establishment hacks. Chris Matthews, of all people, understands this quite well:

"If the plan of those in power is to raise a ton of cash and run nasty TV ads saying you can't vote for this new person, that he or she is flawed, I expect the voter will say, 'Are you telling me I have no choice but to vote for you? Are you saying that I, this little voter out here, dare not take a chance on someone who has not yet let me down, as you have? If that is what you're telling me, that I have no choice... well Mr. Big Stuff, you just have to wait, stay up late election night and see what I have done.'''

Let there be no mistake. Neither Republican elitists nor Democratic elitists are happy with the defeat of liberal GOP incumbents. Now there's a chance (albeit a small one in some cases) that Conservatives will take more power from the Combine.

Update:

They keep pushing.