Things aren't going very well up in Pennsylvania for Rick Santorum. He's been called "this year's most endangered senator". Here's a tip, if you know anyone betting on Santorum '06, TAKE THE BET!There aren't many in the US Senate who show less leadership or vote a more extreme, far-right, party line than Rick Santorum, but we have one rare example right here in Virginia. GeorgeBushAllen is one of the very few US Senators who vote more conservatively than even Rick Santorum.
From his "smile and keep quiet" ads with Senator John Warner to his recent Iraq War flip-flop, GeorgeBushAllen is doing everything he can to cozy up to John Warner in these waning days of the election season for fear that he'll be held accountable for his extremism.
Of course, Virginians know that that dog won't hunt. The national journal rated GeorgeBushAllen and John Warner as the two same-party senators from the same state with the most divergent voting records. Warner and BushAllen were identified as the senate's greatest "Odd Couple". GeorgeBushAllen is doing everything to distance himself from Bush politics, if not Bush dollars.
Voters nationwide are waking up to the hypocrisy of the far-right-wing conservatives like Rick Santorum and GeorgeBushAllen who run today's Republican party, and they are leaving in droves. In particular, the Reagan Democrats are coming home.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and one of the strategists behind the party's 1994 takeover of Congress, told The Times: "The Santorum race shows that Reagan Democrats are returning to their roots. Economic issues among blue-collar social conservatives are now subsuming concerns about social issues."The Republican party has failed them. It didn't cut spending. It wasn't honest. It hasn't controlled immigration. On issue after issue it didn't do what these voters expected." Mr Luntz says that this political remigration of Reagan Democrats -- which if realised next month would represent a profound change of the American political landscape -- is occurring across the Midwest, where the economy is arguably an even greater issue than Iraq.
Now that Democrats like Jim Webb are putting economic issues back on the table, while Republicans have proven their cynical betrayal of social conservatives again, and again, there really is no place like home for the Reagan Dems.