Baucus has been sliding a bit leftish, mostly by emphasizing his CHIP legislation at every turn, and keeping his K-Street connections quiet.
Apparently, that was all the nod that Montana's left needed in order to quell their once burning desire to give Baucus a primary challenge in order to punish him for his deviations from liberal orthodoxy. Baucus has to be thinking to himself -- "wow, that was easy."
Actually, anyone who surfs around the lefty blogosphere in Montana has known for some time that there wouldn't be a primary challenger, given the increasingly friendly tone toward Baucus of late. The Baucus camp felt confident enough to start running paid ads on Left in the West and Montana Netroots, and did it by making the case most likely to win netroots hearts: "Keep a Dem in office," and "help build our majority in 2008."
As E.J. Dionne pointed out today when talking about the Yearly Kos meeting:
The key litmus tests for Kos and his many allies in the blogosphere involve not long lists of issues developed by the ACLU or the AFL-CIO, but loyalty in standing up against Bush and doing what's necessary to build a Democratic majority.
In other words, anyone who puts policy ahead of partisanship gets booted out the netroots door -- or is at least made to stand in the corner.
Dionne may have come to this on his own, but we suspect that he drew heavily from Jonathan Chait's famous article in the New Republic from back in May, in which Chait dissected the liberal netroots movement and came up with the conclusion that it is, first and foremost, a movement consciously modelling itself on the conservative movement -- which it perceives as being a take-no-prisoners partisan enterprise.
We might argue about how accurate Chait's take on the conservative movement was (would that we had actually been as organized, determined, and unified as he portrays,) but he made some excellent points. The article was and is well-worth reading.
But getting back to Baucus: before reading Chait's article, MH would have predicted a primary challenge from the left, intended to drive him in that direction. After reading Chait's article, we were certain that there would never be such a challenge -- unless the left were convinced that Baucus was 100% unassailable in the general election. Since winning is everything in the new liberal netroots world (at least according to Chait -- and now Dionne,) nothing that created enough dissension to risk the seat would be done.
The lack of a Baucus challenger from the left suggests that what MH has been saying for some time is apparently an opinion shared by our Democratic friends: Baucus is more vulnerable in this election than he has been in a long time -- and not just in the event of a Rehberg challenge.
Consider also the quick Democratic move to grab domain names associated with Bob Keenan. All of this should cause Republicans to consider this race to be in play -- because apparently Democrats do.
