I get a certain amount of glee from the title of this piece, frankly!
Seems Allen has about the same amount of coattails as the monkey! And talk about STUPID--the guy just doesn't think things through!
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http://www.rollcall.com/issues/51_50/news/11208-1.html....For Allen, the fallout from the Kilgore campaign represents the first bit of bad political news in months. He was recently profiled in one of the most significant conservative publications, the National Review, with a glowing cover picture. And as others have stumbled in the Senate in recent months — Frist is under investigation for his personal finances, and Santorum is trailing badly in his own Senate race — Allen has been increasingly been seen as potentially the most viable Senator to contend for the GOP nomination.
But the Kilgore defeat, at least for now, has some asking questions about Allen’s viability — as well as the fact that,
were he to join a successful national ticket, he’d be replaced by a Democrat appointed by Kaine. “In addition to the hit that his own guy got smacked down, its hard to argue that you should be president or
when a Democrat is going to appoint your successor to the Senate,” said one GOP operative...Allen shrugged off that suggestion entirely, saying it had never entered his mind. “I hadn’t thought about that,” he said of his successor in the Senate if he were to move to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “That’s a good question. I hadn’t thought about it.” But his supporters say that, if anything, Kilgore didn’t do enough to attach himself to Allen and Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), both of whom remain very popular.
Allen and Warner, earlier this fall, went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and cut ads for Kilgore to use, providing him with a pair of surrogates in the same way Warner appeared in many Kaine ads. ...Instead, those ads never ran, two GOP sources said. They only appeared on Kilgore’s web site....“There are some people who might make it out to be that this was an election between George Allen and Mark Warner, and that’s just absurd,” said Chris LaCivita, Allen’s longtime adviser. Blaming some GOP members of the state Legislature who worked with Warner on key state issues and helped enhance his popularity, LaCivita noted that Warner’s legacy was on the line, not Allen’s.
Others in Allen’s camp also contended that Kilgore underperformed the other statewide GOP candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor, both of whom hit 50 percent or better. They suggested that Kilgore was not a good candidate, particularly in areas of the state that have yielded stronger support for Republicans. And, his decision to run a heavily negative campaign — including ads that suggested Kaine wouldn’t even support the death penalty for Adolf Hitler — soured moderate voters in northern Virginia, one adviser said. ...