Hard A'Starboard.

     In the wake of the PA 18 district race any number of the talking head punditry are asserting that a viable strategy for Democrats in working class venues is that they must be seen as running to the right of the larger Democratic establishment.  This may have worked, just friggin' barely, in the PA 18 race but I have to wonder how well this will work in even the short run.  Currently the vanishingly few pro-gun, pro-life, and not reflexively anti-business Democrats are swimming hard upstream against the increasingly turbulent flow of a Democratic party which has, very plainly, decided to throw in with much of the hard left's SJW whack-jobbery and sneering debasement of the half of the electorate that did not vote for Hillary.

     Something about this smacks of Hamas tactics.  Not in the particulars, well not entirely, but more along the lines that Hamas, and others in the middle-east, says one thing in English or European languages for foreign consumption, and something entirely contradictory in Arabic for local consumption.  There is of course a tendency to try to pull off this hustle in less perfervid polities, but it doesn't work very well when the same language is used for both local and national consumption.  The differences between, say, Minnesota and Tennessee may be fairly robust, but in neither case can citizens of those states use a form of English that will not be understood by all.

     So it seems to me that the Hamas Hustle will be virtually impossible to employ with any hope of success.  Lamb had to run so far to the right of the national party that he had to paint himself as a Democrat In Name Only to close the deal, and for all that running he was rewarded with an absurdly thin margin of "victory".  Some "Wise Men" aver that when these newly minted DINOs, however many they may be, make it to the Hill they will be given pats on the head by the party elite and will be expected to rubber-stamp the party's increasingly hard left politics.

     Maybe this will occur with Lamb, probably even, but it will not go un-noticed by his constituents.  This is the age of the internet after all and newbie conservative Dem. pols, however few they may be, elected in an anti-Trump fever may well find that their constituents revile the harder than hard left programmatics of the Dems more than they despise The Donald.

     PA 18 is just a first test case, but there is ample opportunity for Lamb to prove, or disprove, his maverick bona-fides in the months leading up to the fall elections.  I seriously doubt that Lamb will survive more than one term if he turns into a Dem. good boi.

     I've also heard some nattering about the return of that extinct creature, the Blue Dog Democrat, with Lamb as the first example of a trend.  Uh, no.  Far too much of the Democratic party's store of political capital is tied up in, and tied to, the radical woke left for a nascent pack of Blue Dogs to be anything but a brief flicker of sanity.