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War Liberal's has what I think of as the single best piece of tactical advice:
In 1990, Bill Weld, a culturally liberal Republican, successfully ran for governor of Massachusetts against John Silber, a bigoted, theocratic crank of a Democrat who somehow ran an incredible streak of offending a different ethnic minority every week. Had I been registered in Massachusetts at the time, I certainly would have voted for Weld. But Weld's ascendancy led to a succession of Republican governors, the last two of which have been an incompetent and a cultural hardliner; so it's possible that that would have been a strategic mistake.
The first step, it seems to me, is to utterly destroy the remnants of the Rockefeller wing of the GOP. We can't afford to have anyone taking away blue-state Senate seats and governorships. Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, and any others cannot be allowed to straddle the fence anymore. Either they're with the Democrats, or they're with the far right. That may not be fair, but it's exactly a mirror image of what the Republicans have done in the South. It's harder with governors, but when Arnold runs for election in two years, the Democrats have to make Californians think that Bush is his running mate and DeLay his chief of staff. The same in New York: if whoever the Republicans nominate to succeed Pataki is even so much as photographed with Bush, make it seem like they're two peas in a pod.This is essentially why I voted against my state senator, even though he's a nice guy with generally good policy positions (he won anyway). Sorry, Richard, it's nothing personal, it's just that you're still a running-dog lackey of the American Taliban terror militia death brigade that quests daily to eat our babies, and politics ain't beanbag.
In 1990, Bill Weld, a culturally liberal Republican, successfully ran for governor of Massachusetts against John Silber, a bigoted, theocratic crank of a Democrat who somehow ran an incredible streak of offending a different ethnic minority every week. Had I been registered in Massachusetts at the time, I certainly would have voted for Weld. But Weld's ascendancy led to a succession of Republican governors, the last two of which have been an incompetent and a cultural hardliner; so it's possible that that would have been a strategic mistake.