The anti-establishment political tide that ousted a three-term Republican senator in Utah has already spread well beyond the grassroots conservative tea party movement and continues to cause waves.
On Tuesday it toppled a longtime Democratic congressman from West Virginia and several White House-favored lawmakers elsewhere find themselves confronting liberal voters who do not want party elites telling them what to do.
In Pennsylvania, many Democrats seem unmoved by US President Barack Obama’s pleas to embrace former Republican Arlen Specter in next Tuesday’s primary.
Specter’s nomination seemed virtually assured last year when the entire Democratic establishment, including Governor Ed Rendell, backed him in exchange for his switch from the Republican Party. But Representative Joe Sestak, who bills himself as the contest’s true Democrat, has erased Specter’s big lead in the polls.
Obama has cut a last-minute TV ad for Specter in the hope of avoiding an embarrassing upset.
Should Specter lose, he would be the third prominent politician in a month to fall in intraparty contests dominated by restless voters who show little respect for established figures and party leaders.
In Florida, Republican Governor Charlie Crist was expected to cruise into the Senate, with barely a thought to his party’s primary. But conservative Marco Rubio and tea party activists drove Crist out of the Republican Party, and he is now running as an independent.
In Utah, 17-year Senate veteran Bob Bennett fell victim on Saturday to the once-unthinkable claim that he’s not conservative enough for Republicans. His sins, according to tea party activists who taunted him at a Republican convention, include voting for the 2008 bank bailout pushed by former US president George W. Bush.
In Democratic races, senators Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Michael Bennet of Colorado are battling viable primary opponents attacking them from the left. Obama supports both incumbents, but their challengers portray themselves as more faithful to Democratic priorities.
In West Virginia, 14-term Representative Alan Mollohan lost the Democratic nomination for his seat to state Senator Mike Oliverio on Tuesday.
Oliverio attacked Mollohan from the right, rather than the left, and focused on the lawmaker’s history of ethics probes.
Perhaps the clearest example of veterans’ woes is the tough challenge in Arizona facing Senator John McCain by conservative J.D. Hayworth, a radio talk show host and former House member.
Some elected officials say bipartisanship is the biggest victim of strong anti-establishment movements. One factor cited in the Utah Republicans’ rejection of Bennett, who had a lifetime rating of 84 percent from the American Conservative Union, was his bid to forge a health care compromise with Democratic Senator Ron Wyden.
The Wyden-Bennett bill went nowhere. But the Utah events show the Republican base “doesn’t want them to compromise” at all, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said.
“The Republican Party now has the narrowest base that I have seen” since entering Congress 29 years ago, Hoyer said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is also in trouble this year, but his re-election problems loom in November, not the primary.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
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