Angles - Both Acute and Obtuse

Any regular reader of this Blog will know that I normally stick to national events with a few excursions into Arizona politics and, every once in a while, into international stuff.

But today I venture into another state’s affairs. In fact two, but more of the second one later.

First let’s look at Nevada and the primaries there earlier this week.

Clearly my interest is that one of the incumbent senators is Harry Reid who is way past his “Sell By Date”. His opponent in November will be staunch conservative Assemblywoman Sharron Angle who swept from also-ran status to a stunning political upset that pundits said would “long be remembered.

”"We have completed the first step to taking back our U.S. senate seat," Angle told supporters. "We need to say to Harry Reid, you have failed and you are fired."

Now according to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, “It’s no big deal”. But just as soon as she finished whistling past the graveyard, her diminutive buddy, little Chrissy chimed in with his take and denounced the Tea Party as a bunch of old, armed, dissatisfied white people.

But there is another point of view and without little Chrissy's inherent bias.

“The Tea Party can take a lot of the credit for this upset,” Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics said. He added Angle’s come-from-behind victory “will be long remembered.”

“And I think it tells us something about the tea parties,” he added. “The tea party doesn’t just want candidates who agree with them on the issues. They really want an authenticity. They want someone who’s totally outside the establishment, someone who doesn’t reek of politics as usual, and that’s what they have with Sharron Angle, who’s of, by, and from the grass roots.

And Harry Reid wanted to run against her -- now we’ll see if that was a good choice.”

Angle is a former teacher and five-term state representative. She sponsored the Proposition 13 measure in Nevada that put a hard cap on future property tax increases.

Reid is expected to portray her as an extremist out of touch with mainstream politics. On her Web site, Angle supports closing down the U.S. Department of Education because she considers its federal role in education unconstitutional. And that’s not going to sit well with government unions.

So even though Angle appears to have an 11 point advantage over Reid who knows what Democratic voters will stand for?

Consider the Palmetto State otherwise known as South Carolina. The Democrats there just selected one Alvin Greene as their candidate to confront Senator Jim DeMint even though Mr. Green is still facing an obscenity felony charge.

Even more than that, poor Mr. Greene is functionally illiterate, didn’t campaign and it isn’t clear to me that he knows what he’s running for. The first time I heard about this I thought it was a spoof but then I watched the obnoxious Keith Olberman last night …….

If Olberman had found himself up against a Republican interviewee he would have taken him apart shred by shred without regard for the person’s inherent inadequacy. Heck, he tried it often enough with President George W. in absentia.

Perhaps, the saddest part of the whole thing and not just for poor Alvin but for the democratic voters of South Carolina as well, was his truthful assertion that he got 59%.

Exit polls indicated that Mr. Greene won because his name was at the top of the ballot.