Mike Castle’s Electorial Conundrum

Rick Perlstein wrote a very smart piece in Newsweek discussing how Sarah Palin highlights the very real split in the GOP among the conservative intellectual elite (yes, I know) — some want to quit the old coalition largely built on populist resentments and others want to chart a broader, more inclusive direction. This part of the article interests me:

Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots. In postwar America, a panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency. In the Kennedy years, the right-wing militia known as the Minutemen armed for what they believed would be an imminent Russian takeover. In the Carter years it was the Posse Comitatus; Bill Clinton’s rise saw six anti-abortion murders and the Oklahoma City bombings. Each time, the conservative mainstream was able to adroitly hive off the embarrassing fringe while laying claim to some of the grassroots anger that inspired it. Now the violence is back. But this time, the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find. This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O’Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O’Reilly’s claim that “Tiller the baby killer” was getting away with “Nazi stuff” helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller’s alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

It seems to me that the Castle videos we were looking at from the townhall downstate captured this split between the old school conservative elite (Castle) and the so-called grassroots looking for their populist due. And these grassroots can only be happy with results that jive with what their real leadership — the Limbaughs, the Becks, the Savages and all of the other managers of resentments — tell them might ameliorate those fears and resentments. Nothing does, of course, because they only way these folks are useful is if they are glued to every word their radios and TVs say.

So the question is how many people who think that the government is trying to vaccinate them without permission does Castle need to win a primary? It is hard to know without numbers, but all over the Northeast at least, so-called moderate Republicans are having a very difficult time winning primaries. Those who lose their primaries see a Democrat win the office. Why? Because the current GOP base (or at least if you assume the folks in that video are the base) have very little to speak to, much less convince independents to vote for them. UI asked this question earlier — can Castle survive a primary given that so much of the “grass-roots” have apparently lost their minds?