Two clocks striking midnight ten seconds apart every day – the first does not cause the other. An incumbent who has so angered his base that he is primaried would be in trouble in general election regardless of the primary challenge. So yes, Jimmy Carter was primaried and lost the general election, and the same happened to Jerry Ford. But does anyone think that had Carter not been primaried he would have beaten Reagan, or that Ford could have been elected after pardoning Nixon? Or even that George Bush Sr. could have beaten Clinton if only he had not been challenged by Buchannan.
Primary challenges are a very different animal than third party candidates. Third party candidates can and do act as spoilers taking votes away from what would otherwise have been a less of two evils. So although there were plenty of other reasons Al Gore lost in 2000, had Ralph Nader not been on the ballot, Gore would have won. That is a provable mathematical fact.
The “primarying Obama will get us President Bachman” argument is the same type of chicken game as the Republicans are playing with the debt ceiling. Threaten the apocalypse and then settle for complete surrender. We are not going to have President Bachman. The policies the Republicans are pushing are anathema to average Americans, and polling proves that. Regardless of whether Obama is the nominee, we will win if we can make a clear contrast to the voters. In fact, we would be better able to make that contrast with a different nominee.
Primarying Obama will be good for the Party and the Eventual Nominee
Without a primary challenge, the news cycle for the next fifteen months will be the many Republican candidates tearing down the Democrats and the administration. Given the Administration’s above it all approach to anything even slightly partisan, expect no effective response. But image a primary challenger out there 24/seven attacking the Republicans and putting forward a coherent Progressive vision. In the 2004 election, while Kerry, Dean, Edwards and the others were all out there bashing Bush, his ratings went into free fall. Bush only recovered when Kerry locked up the nomination and disappeared from public consciousness until the Convention – by which time it was too late.
Primaries build organizations and parties. Had Obama won in New Hampshire and eliminated Clinton and all the others with the first primary he would never have built the nationwide grassroots organization that propelled him to victory. He had to campaign in states that Democrats had written off in the general for years and found surprising strength – with the result that they put the resources into places like North Carolina and Indiana and turned them blue. It was also a time when he found some of the problems in his message and tried to fix them. My opinion is that his campaign advisors assume a level of grassroots activism that they can simply call forth and which is not in fact there. If that is true, we are much better off if we discover that now.
But the most important result of this primary challenge will be the building of a nationwide progressive grassroots movement that will continue on after 2012 regardless of the outcome. If that movement does not nominate its choice in 2012, so be it. But consider what 2013 would look like if Obama where not primaried and lost anyway, we would not have built the infrastructure we’d need to oppose the ruling tea party conservatives. In 2016, our standard bearer would start out as the prohibitive favorite. Remember that the conservative movement we are still fighting came together out of Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Ford in 1976.
