Lisa Murkowski Concedes Divine Right of Senators

Lisa Murkowski finally conceded the republican nomination for Senate to at party and Sarah Palin backed Joe Miller towards the waning moments of the recount last night. The final stack of ballots would have had to fall in Murkowski’s favor by 55% in order for her to eke out a victory. It did not seem likely and ultimately did not turn out that way, so she gave up her death grip on power.

The conventional wisdom said Miller would win when the absentee ballots were counted because, since Alaska is a solidly Republican state, the people are going to vote for the republican nominee regardless. If a voter is motivated enough to file an absentee ballot in the primary, it is because he has strong emotions about a candidate. Usually, incumbents do not generate such emotions, so absentee voters are either angry at the incumbent or truly excited about the challenger. Whichever the rationale, the newcomer is favored.

But that particular lesson in political cience is not the important one to take away from the Alaska GOP primary or Senate. What you should observe is the desperation with which Murkowski clutched onto power. She was defeated, fair and square, yet she looked into legal options, ruing on other party tickets, and probably considered a Charlie Crist independent run she was blocked from all of them by money, ballot access, or technicalities, but reasons beyond her control were the only ones keeping her from pursuing each one of them until she found one that worked.

Murkowski is a RINO, but for the sake o argument, I am going to consider her a faithful Republican solely because I think all politicians have this aggressive sense of entitlement to power once they have held it for even a small length of time. Progressives wear the idea on their sleeves since they consider being part of the ruling class a holy calling, but it pays to note how fast conservatives will embrace the idea, too. At the expense of the people’s will, no less.