Will GOP Infighting Help Democrats Pick Off Vulnerable Republicans In Red Districts?

Will Dem Jack McDonald take away Clear Channel's House seat?

We've been talking about Democrats going after House seats that Republicans are sitting in-- and obstructing President Obama from-- districts he won in November. But that doesn't preclude also going after obstructionist Republican incumbents in districts that Obama didn't win. One that The Hill is reporting the DCCC is looking at is Michael McCaul's district (TX-10) that was created by the grand Texas Tom DeLay gerrymander and stretches from Austin all the way across to the Houston suburbs. In 2008 McCaul only managed 54% against Larry Joe Doherty, slightly less than McCain managed in the district.

The DCCC never really got behind Doherty in any significant way, thinking that the voters there were satisfied with a garden variety rubber stamp backbencher like McCaul. Now they've looked at the voting trends in the district and they smell blood in the water. McCaul has been an inflexible obstructionist, unwilling to allow Obama to work to dig us out of the mess the catastrophic Bush policies McCaul and his Republican colleagues cheerled got us into. There is a sense in the district that it really is time for a change.

Now, not everyone feels that way. As an example, let's look at how the GOP has obstructed the seating of Al Franken to the Senate seat he won. Many people there-- Obama won the seat, 54-44%-- want to see Franken in the Senate working for the state and helping Obama put his program through. Die-hard reactionaries, however, feel otherwise.

Republican Jim Bendtsen, 54, a computer systems engineer from Ramsey, says he's willing to forgo a senator if it means slowing President Obama's agenda. "I'm in favor of keeping Franken out of office as long as possible," he says. "The more votes Obama has at the federal level, the more damage I think he's going to do to America."

And Texas has more than its share of Jim Bendtsens who would rather see America fail than Obama succeed. But are there enough like that-- in TX-10-- to re-elect McCaul? Jack McDonald, a Democrat considering running for the seat doesn't think so-- and, even before announcing, he's raised over $300,000.

Texas Democrats are ready to pounce on a district that they believe is trending blue. "It's the most Democratic of all the Texas districts that is not already held by a Democrat," said one party insider.

Democrats also point to other trends in McCaul's district, which spans from the outskirts of Austin in Travis County southeast to Harris County, near Houston. The majority of the district's population lies around those cities, with the Austin area being more Democratic-leaning and the Houston area more Republican. Democrats say voters outside Houston tend not to turn out in non-presidential years, which would benefit McDonald. Democrats also tout recent gains in Harris's county-wide elections.

"The demographics are changing," said Boyd Richie, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. "The district is becoming really similar to those that we have competed in and have had some success in."

With Republican "leaders" in disarray and at each other's throats, 2010 is looking like the kind of replay of 1934, the first midterm after FDR's first election. The 1934 election followed two years of vicious Republican obstructionism and finger-pointing and resulted in another 10 GOP Senate seats lost (leaving them with an impotent rump of 25 Republicans-- which sunk still further in 1936) and another 14 House seats gone (leaving the once dominant GOP House caucus with a mere 103 members, which eventually sank down to 88 as the obstructionism and petty intra-party bickering intensified).

Here in California, the GOP Is just a cult that has given up fighting Democrats and is just putting all its energy into a bitter ideological civil war, with the various kooky factions trying to spark recall elections against each other. Greg Sargent recounted the in-fighting on the Hill, with Pence, Boehner, Cantor and Ryan all engaging in dirty tactics against each other.

Privately, Cantor and the lawmaker tasked with writing the GOP budget, Rep. Paul D. Ryan, had urged the party to hold off going public until it could produce a finished product. Both men wanted a more detailed proposal with dollar figures that would make it a more defensible document. Boehner and House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence disagreed, hoping to counter as quickly as possible Democrats’ charge that Republicans are “the Party of No.” The result was a botched rollout and bad press.

And someone wants to shift the blame for the botched budget rollout away from Eric Cantor.

Why the leak now? Dems, of course, are elevating Cantor as the face of the obstructionist opposition in a way they aren’t doing with Boehner-- recall the full-scale Dem on Cantor’s worry about pols “overreacting” to the crisis.

Cantor’s staff seems generally more attuned than some other House GOP staffers to the potential effectiveness of the Dem attacks on the GOP as the “party of No.” Indeed, Cantor seems wary of being wholly lumped in with the rest of the leadership, and seems to want to preserve a bit of independence, given his obvious ambitions and designs on a political promotion down the road.

RepubliClowns from Howie Klein on Vimeo.