John Derbyshire is upset at Rep. Peter King.
Now, Derbyshire's right that King usually can be counted upon to say something foolish. But in this case, he's got a point. Usually one party has been national, while the other party has been sectional. This almost always bodes well for the national party, for obvious arithmetical reasons.
As for Rep. King, he's proposing the northeast as the mirror-image of what happened to the Dems in the South, something I've been concerned about for a while. It wasn't until the Dems were almost completely run out of everything south of the Mason-Dixon line, except for Maryland & DC, that they started finding horses for courses. The leadership is now solidly liberal-left and likely to remain so, while the more moderate-types elected so are junior and likely to vote the party line set by that leadership.
Why are we worried about replicating that? We remember Rockefeller, and we worry about our leadership's ability to resist pressures to move to the left. Such pressures only reinforce the Dems' leadership, rather than undermine it.
