In what could be a nightmare scenario for Republican Party officials, conservative activists are gearing up to challenge leading GOP candidates in more than a dozen key House and Senate races in 2010.



Conservatives and tea party activists had already set their sights on some of the GOP’s top Senate recruits-- a list that includes Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida, former Rep. Rob Simmons in Connecticut and Rep. Mark Kirk in Illinois, among others.



But their success in Tuesday’s upstate New York special election, where grass-roots efforts pushed GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava to drop out of the race and helped Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman surge into the lead on the eve of Election Day, has generated more money and enthusiasm than organizers ever imagined.



Activists predict a wave that could roll from California to Kentucky to New Hampshire and that could leave even some GOP incumbents-- Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is one-- facing unexpectedly fierce challenges from their right flank.



“I would say it’s the tip of the spear,” said Dick Armey, the former GOP House majority leader who now serves as chairman of FreedomWorks, an organization that has been closely aligned with the tea party movement. “We are the biggest source of energy in American politics today.”



“What you’re going to see,” said Armey, “is moderates and conservatives across the country in primaries.”



These high-stakes primaries, pitting the activist wing of the party against the establishment wing, stand to have a profound impact on the 2010 election landscape since they will create significant problems for moderate candidates recruited by the national party precisely because they appear well-suited to win in places that are not easily-- or even plausibly-- won by conservative candidates.

With the taste of blood fresh in their mouths-- albeit their own blood -- teabaggers are already mapping out a game plan for challenging dozens of Establishment Republicans running for office-- incumbents and challengers alike. Yesterday when Rush Limbaugh launched into his bestiality diatribe about Dede Scozzafava, it was thefor a contemporary movement of anti-American Know Nothings and misfits. Listen as Limbaugh tries asserting primacy not just over Michael Steele (dead meat), John Cornyn, John Boehner, and Miss McConnell, but, more to the point, over Glenn Beck, his arch rival:Today's Politico painted a picture the Republican Inside-the-Beltway power structure is probably not ready for. But probably has no way to resist:And it goes beyond just draining off Republican dollars into costly primary battles with far right insurgents. The real worry is that the sense of teabagger entitlement, stoked by the Hate Talk radio and TV the GOP has so carefully nurtured-- how soon beforestart asking Pelosi and Reid to revisit the Fairness Doctrine?-- will force mainstream candidates to start taking extremist positions that play well to the Know Nothings, Glenn Beck crowd, birthers, deathers and teababggers-- but that can't win in moderate suburban districts the Republicans need to win back in order to regain some degree of national relevance. Virginia Republican, Tom Davis, former chairman of the NRCC, has a warning for this party: "For me, what this says is, we need to take a deep breath and decide whether [moderates and conservatives] work together or not. And if we don’t, it can get very, very ugly.”It already is very, very ugly down in Florida, where the once popular governor, Charlie Crist, considered a shoe-in for election to the Senate over a mediocre Democrat best known as a corrupt mama's boy with no principles or values beyond advancing his own career. Now Gov. Crist looks like he'll lose the Republican primary to Marco Rubio, darling of the national teabagger set, a charismatic extremist who is likely to scare off mainstream Florida voters in a general election. Rubio sees what happened in NY-23 as heralding in a new day for extreme right-wing fanatics like himself. "NY-23, on some scale, is the first battle of a larger internal Republican debate over how to define the party. They want us to vote for their candidates, but they don’t want us to run for office.”One thing about the teabaggers is that they are unified around a theme that they would rather see the GOP lose than see mainstream Republicans win elections. One of the craziest of the kooks running for Congress is whacked-out wingnut Bradley Rees , a former Republican aspirant for the Virginia seat now held by Tom Periello. About a week ago, seeing all the attention Doug Hoffman was getting in NY-23, Rees dropped out of the Republican primary and declared he would run as a third party (teabagger) candidate. Rees seems eager to destroy the GOP. “It," he remarks about his fledgling campaign, "may amount to only drawing enough votes from the Republican candidate to ensure Tom Perriello a second term. If so, so be it. Maybe then, the party will understand that we are trying to save the GOP from its worst enemy-- not the Democrats, but themselves."The loon running the teabagger scene in Florida, Everett Wilkinson, one of the power brokers behind Rubio, basically parrots the same line: “We would lose if Charlie Crist got elected or if another person who doesn’t support our policies got elected. Our members are actively going to get out there and create awareness of the governor’s actions.” And a teabagging big shot in Illinois, Evert Evertsen, is just as explicit about his movement's decision to wreck GOP candidate Mark Kirk's campaign: “We’re going to work hard as hell to make sure Mark Kirk doesn’t win. Mark Kirk is about as liberal as Arlen Specter was."Lunatic fringe Republicans like Evertsen, Wilkinson and Rees are good news for Democrats is what could have been a tough electoral environment. But with teabaggers and extremists forcing mainstream candidates off the ballot-- and replacing them with a bizarre assortment of radical right ideologues, it is Democrats who will stand to gain the most. It would be ironic if the teabaggers' biggest achievement is to elect Kendrick Meek, the weakest candidate the Democrats could have possibly put up in Florida, someone who stands for nothing and would have no chance whatsoever against Crist but who could actually wind up as a plausible bastion against the rise of a dangerous and ugly strain of American fascism.

Labels: 2010 congressional races, Charlie Crist, crazy extremists, Limbaugh, Rubio, teabaggers