I personally thing there is a long term “grand strategy” but it’s not the Republicans, it from the Democrats.

I think the real play is for the ladies of the north, Collins and Snowe.
I think that grabbing Specter was a precursor to those two doing the same thing, and jumping ship, and saying they are forced out as the party turns harder right, and purges the moderates (which will have more than a grain of truth to it). Remember, they have TREMENDOUS popularity in their state, and don’t need to switch in the face of primary challenges.
So getting them to switch (and I think they’d go as a pair) would give a huge boost to the administration. It’ll take awhile, but look for it.

The Democrats took this bet (bringing him aboard) and now have the chance to portray Specter as the irascible old uncle, and prove to everyone out there that see, the Democratic party can handle internal dissent, and accept it, while the Republicans simply purges moderates and call them traitors.

That gives the super majority and then some to the Democrats, reinforces the irrelevance of Republicans, and in 2010 they go up a seat or more.

Then the arguments are between moderate Dems and the progressive wing of the Democratic party… with the Republicans waving their hands and going to tea-parties, and shouting socialism, or fascism, or communism or whatever.

So Specter could be a huge game changer, IMHO.
And cherchez les femmes.

I must have confused Reid’s (non-existant) no-primary-challenge deal with Reid’s (very real) no-loss-of-committee-seniority deal.

Pretend I didn’t write that last phrase. It’s superfluous, and I don’t know what I was thinking.

I highly doubt that a primary challenge to Specter would turn out the way that some Democrats hope it will. Should Specter have to defend his left flank in the primary and then his right in the general, I think the inevitable flip-flopping will be easily exploitable by even a moderately well-run campaign. Even if Sestak beats out Specter in a primary, there’s no guarantee that Obama’s coattails will be long enough in a year that Sestak can just ride them in.

Party professionals know that Specter is at least nominally a Democrat now, and is a ranking member of high-profile committees, including the one that initially goes over Supreme Court nominations. If the Democrats succeed in challenging Specter, they lose that, and the party leaders know that.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/05/poll-ridge-leads-toomey-in-2010-pennsylvania-senate-primary—-by-a-landslide.php

I also think you missed the truly odd part of that paragraph by Reihan. It’s a classic “…and a pony” argument.

Sure,Toomey would stand a much better chance if he stopped his “tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts” chant long enough to offer reasonable suggestions on health care, energy, and transportation. He’d also stand a much better chance if he cured cancer, reconciled Israel and Palestine, and gave every Pennsylvanian a shiny new pony. Reihan fails to mention how such an unlikely sequence of events can or should happen, though.

Explain to me what Toomey is hoping to accomplish. To prove a point? To register a protest? If so, that’s fine as far as it goes. I have no problem with protest candidacies and protest voting. However, if we judge these things by the likelihood of success at the polls, it just doesn’t make sense.

I want to give Toomey enough credit that he decided to run for Senate not just to get even with Specter, but because he thought he had some chance at winning in the general election. If that is what he believed going in, I’m afraid I just don’t see it. Now maybe Toomey can prove me wrong, run an excellent campaign and beat whoever comes up against him. Everything I have seen happen in Pennsylvania politics over the last three years tells me this cannot happen.

What is the end result going to be? Unless Toomey pulls out a win in the general election, which I would have to rate as a major upset, all that will have been accomplished is to serve up one more case for meliorists everywhere to cite as proof that whatever part of Toomey’s message they want to discredit is political poison. Pro-choicers and welfarists will take his defeat as vindication, because their opponents made the mistake of putting up a candidate in a state where any conservative Republican is going to have an incredibly difficult time winning.

Primary challenges against RINOs should be run based on principle alone. Conservative ideas may not be widely popular at the moment, but you surely cannot win if you do not try. You can’t advance them if you don’t have someone advocating them. (Not that Toomey is an ideal advocate.) As Howard Phillips say, “To achieve victory first you must seek it.” No one is going to hand it to you.