Forgive me for not remembering the details on this, but I recall an incident back in 2000, during the controversy over votes in Florida, where Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch was on some television show passionately arguing for a position on some particular technical or legal element of the vote-counting battle. The host informed him that the stance he was taking was actually that of the Gore campaign, not the Bush campaign. Without missing a beat, Hatch said something like, "Of course, and that's why..." whereupon he immediately began to argue, just as passionately, for the opposite position from the one he had taken seconds before. To me, this was always emblematic of Hatch's approach as someone who was eager to engage in the most aggressive partisanship on whatever the question of the moment was, happy to impugn Democrats' motives and toss about extreme rhetoric. At the same time, however, you always get the sense with Hatch that he knows it's largely a game. He could throw the partisan bombshells, then share a laugh with his good friend Ted Kennedy. Well now, despite being a solid conservative for all his 35 years in the Senate, Hatch may get tossed by the Tea Party in a primary; one recent poll found Utah Republicans evenly split between him and Rep. Jason Chaffetz. Hatch's biggest problem is that Utah Republicans don't have primaries; their nominees are chosen at a party convention. And who comes to party conventions? People who are fired up. That's what did in another longtime Utah conservative, Sen. Bob Bennett, who lost the vote at the 2010 Utah GOP convention to an upstart 39-year-old Tea Party candidate who had never held public office before. And now, Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, straining to keep itself at the vanguard of an unruly movement, has decided to target Hatch as well. Hatch is doing what he can to stave off the rebellion, including desperately, pathetically kissing up to the Tea Party. According to the Deseret News, "It is not unusual for Hatch to call [Utah Tea Party founder David] Kirkham several times a day to weigh his opinion on issues and legislation. He invited Kirkham to sit with him in a suite at a BYU football game last fall, and Hatch attended a picnic with Kirkham and other tea party members and has joined him for town hall meetings and economic forums." Nevertheless, Kirkham has vowed to get Hatch booted from office. For Armey and the Tea Party, this is a rational move. It's extremely difficult for a Democrat to win statewide in Utah, so if Chaffetz runs, they'll probably wind up with a slightly more conservative Senator than they have now. But more importantly, they'll keep Republican incumbents running scared. Everyone who gets a threat from the Tea Party will look over at Utah and see Orrin Hatch's head atop a pike. For the Tea Party to remain relevant, it needs to keep purging people in GOP primaries, and Hatch may be the easiest victim to claim. The Tea Party can be as crazy as it wants on policy, so long as Republicans continue to fear it.
