Well, let’s roll through those “Sacrificial Lamb” Senate challenger list.

Dateline Tennessee.  The Most Embarrassing Candidate of the 2012 election cycle.  Here’s your Mark Clayton update.  And depressing as Hell.  Because… the… Tea Party is focusing all of itself on fiscal discipline?

Mark Clayton, the disavowed Democratic Senate nominee, might be unpopular with his own party’s leaders, but he beats the hell out of Bob Corker with tea partiers. This week, Clayton lost to independent Shaun Crowell but thumped the incumbent Corker in a straw poll of the Humphreys County Tea Party. The vote was Crowell 60, Clayton 7 and Corker only 1. […]

Clayton gave a little speech to the tea party before the straw poll, scoring points when he ranted against the homosexual menace but losing support when he waffled on whether he might vote for President Obama. That’s Pangle’s analysis of the results anyway.

In other Mark Clayton news, he appeared on Janet Mefferd’s Christian Right radio show this afternoon. Mefferd, who is virulently anti-gay, likened Clayton’s situation to that of Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin—each has been ostracized by his party for courageously sticking up for crazy right wing things. The only difference, according to Mefferd, is that the media isn’t paying much attention to the plight of Clayton.

The state party is tripping into some rough waters with this one.

Apparently in an attempt to show Democrats are moving forward, as Forrester claims, one Executive Committee member, Cleveland lawyer Jim Bilbo, has been asked to develop proposals to change the party’s bylaws to prevent a nutty fringe candidate from ever again topping the ticket.

Under this plan, the party would try to strike wack jobs from the ballot ahead of time. The difficulty lies in trying to distinguish lunatics from ordinary Democrats. Even Bilbo concedes it’s basically an impossible task.

“We’re in the process of trying to come up with a way to vet candidates and see if they are bona fide Democrats,” Bilbo said.

“Part of that process is coming up with a definition of what is a bona fide Democrat and, you know, it’s not that easy to do.
“Frankly, we have members of the Democratic Party who are members for just a wide variety of reasons. I count myself as an example of that. I’m an evangelical Christian, belong to a Pentecostal church and have been actively involved in my church virtually all of my life. I’m very much pro-life, believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. I own guns and nobody’s going to take them away from me, and I believe we pay too much in taxes, and I believe that government is too big and too intrusive in our lives. But there are other reasons that I’m a Democrat. So our task will be to try to come up with some kind of objectivity.”

It’s the South.  The party is going to consist of a lot of people who Democrats nationally wouldn’t really recognize as Democrats.  Sitting unevenly with people who might well be quasi-Socialists.
No.  The vetting process to weed out your Mark Clayton has to be to prop up the two candidates who were reasonably Democratic.

Onto another race.  Albert Gore Jr in Mississippi gets his CNN profile.

He says he tossed his green beret into the ring when “no one else would step up.”
“I promised the party last year that if no one stepped up, I would,” he said. “I’m not one to sit around and wait for someone else to do it.”

I counted a couple candidates, on paper looking no better and no worse than Albert Gore, Jr.  All I can say is … I hope this old man is making an effort to go across the state, get before audiences and media, and uphold the banner of the Democratic Party.  (Policy wise he appears to be where I’d want him to be.)

A bit more competitive, though The Democratic Party is probably fooling if they expect they will win it, Arizona, and this article in The Atlantic goes a ways toward explaining the sometimes crude identity politics gambit with the Richard Carmona run.

One former Democratic congressional staffer was blunt about what he sees as his party’s inept outreach to Latinos here, calling the president’s drafting of Carmona a “ham-fisted move.” “They speak Spanish in Mexico, they speak Spanish in Puerto Rico. Really?” he asked incredulously. […]
Carmona’s most enthusiastic fan base is not even Latino. The week after I saw the canvassers in Maryvale, I stopped in at a gated community called Hidden Paradise, 25 miles and many tax brackets away, where Carmona was making his pitch to a group of wealthy white donors who called themselves Women for Carmona.  […]  “My name is Richard Henry. Some of my family wanted me to be Ricardo Enrique,” he went on. “But my mom later told me, ‘I named you Richard because you’re going to be a leader.’ ” “Smart woman,” someone murmured appreciatively.

Har de har har.

Looking over the stats page and searches, I bring some interesting items.

“chestnut” and “senate” and “wyoming” and “facebook”
Nobody told me this, but the Wyoming Primary has been held.  Last week of August, apparently.   Final results.

Republican U.S. Senate Race:
John Barasso (winner) 90%
Thomas Bleming 6%
Emmett Mavy 4%

Democratic U.S. Senate Race:
Tim Chestnut (winner) 54%
Al Hamburg 27%
William Bryk  18%

Chestnut did indeed beat the two perennials.  Thankfully… such as I can be thankful for such an unimportant election.  (Will a Democrat ever win a Senate race in Wyoming?)   For second place, the candidate who actually lives in Wyoming right now beat out the one who ran a campaign in Indiana earlier this year — making his Wyoming bid two campaigns from his perch in New York.   About as importantly, the Republican incumbent beat out the neo-nazi… though the neo-nazi beat out a candidate I know nothing about.

Interesting here.
 When Steve Forbes and other guests start arriving Wednesday for a fundraiser for Republican Senate candidate Barry Hinckley, the Raging Grannies will be there too — protesting 

Vote nobody supported by  Steve Forbes.  What is this — billionaires raising funds for billionaires?

There was also some pretty interesting and I’d say bizarre (unless there’s a political context to them) search phrases for Don Bongino, the Maryland Republican sacrificial lamb, but I’ve lost them… unfortunately.

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