Why I'm Sick of Hearing About Bob Bennett

Much ado has been made about Bob Bennett's failure to make the runoff for the Utah primary. As Jack Kelly summarizes, various commentators are horrified:

"This is a damn outrage," said David Brooks, a "conservative" columnist for The New York Times on NBC's "Meet the Press" program last Sunday.

"It's almost a nonviolent coup," agreed E. J. Dionne Jr., a liberal columnist for The Washington Post.

"The long promised purge is on," wrote Kathleen Parker, a "conservative" columnist for the Post.

Not to be outdone, Dana Milbank dramatically claims that Bennett's loss will lead to the demise of the Republican party:

Future historians tracing the crackup of the Republican Party may well look to May 8, 2010, as an inflection point.

That was the day, as is now well known, that Sen. Robert Bennett, who took the conservative position 84 percent of the time over his career, was deemed not conservative enough by fellow Utah Republicans and booted out of the primary.

The problem is that Bennett's ouster just wasn't all that extraordinary. Bennett has historically been a fairly conservative senator, but not remarkably so. Furthermore, over the last two years he has voted for TARP, sponsored an alternative health care bill that included an individual mandate, and overall racked up a record as the 9th most liberal Republican senator in 2009. Given that Utah is one of the two or three most conservative states in the union (and that the delegate based nomination process is disproportionately influenced by the most conservative Utahns) this voting record clearly worked against him.

But there's more to it than a simple issue of the voting record. Utahns (and tea partiers and conservatives everywhere) have had little reason to be happy with the record of Congress over the last decade or so. With the exception of the Bush tax cuts (which are about to expire), there have been few legislative achievements to celebrate. At the same time, government spending has literally doubled over the last ten years. This has been helped along by the Republican congress that approved large, earmark filled appropriations bills and fiscal disasters like the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Clearly, conservatives need senators in Washington who are willing to try to make radical changes.

Looking at the issues pages for Mike Lee, Tim Bridgewater, and Bob Bennett makes it pretty clear that the first two are pretty similar on most issues and that either of them is much more likely to bring change than Bennett. (Bennett's website has been taken down following his loss, but is still cached.) For example, consider the position that each takes on health care. Lee lists repealing ObamaCare as one of his "three vital priorities". Bridgewater also supports the repeal of ObamaCare and provides a detailed set of market based alternative bills that he would want passed. By contrast, Bennett's health care page consists only of two things. The first is a video of him explaining his vote against the final Obamacare bill. He justifies his opposition not through appealing to conservative principles but rather through objecting to the speed with which it was brought to a vote and the questionable accounting practices used to obtain its cost estimate. The second is a list of health care related earmarks that Bennett won for the state of Utah. In short, he doesn't exactly come off as a conservative visionary, especially when compared to Bridgewater and Lee. Instead, he comes off as a Washington insider who would generally vote the conservative line but wouldn't participate on an attack on the worst parts of Washington culture. His awkward video explaining why he no longer supports term limits (unlike his rivals) can only reinforce this perception.

If Republicans force out every moderate and insist on running die hard conservatives in seats that are more suited for moderate candidates, then they will lose races that they should have been able to win. If this happens on a large scale in 2010 and 2012, then, yes, the Republican party will suffer significant damage. But Bennett's seat is in no danger of being lost to the Democrats, and conservatives in Utah have legitimate reasons to be unhappy with him. In short, the circumstances in Utah are uncommon enough that it's time to stop drawing conclusions about national trends and instead acknowledge that reports of the death of the Republican party have been greatly exaggerated.