Fox's Campaign Guru Carl Cameron Breaks It All Down for the I-Man

“Campaign” Carl Cameron of Fox News was out on the trail in the rain yesterday in Pennsylvania, where he was covering the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat there. As predicted, longtime Sen. Arlen Specter, who has switched party affiliation more than once, lost his re-election bid to Rep. Joe Sestak.

“For the Democratic machine in Pennsylvania, it was kind of hard to get excited about a guy who’s been a Republican for the last 30 years,” Cameron observed.

Speaking of Republicans, the hard-fought primary race for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky ended with a surprising victory: Rand Paul, largely seen as the fringe, Tea Party candidate, beat the Mitch McConnell-endorsed Secretary of State Trey Grayson.

“Rand Paul sort of came out of nowhere,” Cameron said of Rep. Ron Paul’s son. “Let’s be realistic: his father is quite famous, and is iconic in the Tea Party, conservative-constitutional-libertarian wing of the Party.”

If nothing else, Rand’s victory shows that the Tea Party movement can get people to the polls. “They’ve got a few more candidates who are going to be on the ballot by the end of the year, and they can definitely give a black eye to the Republican establishment,” said Cameron.

Rand’s chances of winning the general election in a state like Kentucky are pretty good, in Cameron’s view, because, “It’s a Republican area, it’s a Republican seat, it’s a Republican year.”

A Democratic victory yesterday for the late Rep. John Murtha’s seat in western Pennsylvania was not exactly what Republicans had in mind, but Cameron pointed out that victor Mark Critz is not a run-of-the-mill Democrat.

Critz, said Cameron, “won by essentially running against the Obama agenda, and distancing himself from all sorts of things Democrats in Washington are doing…he’s a very, very, very conservative Democrat, and not the kind of Democrat that runs in most of the rest of the country.”

Much attention has been paid lately to Connecticut, where the race for Senator Chris Dodd’s soon-to-be-vacated seat took an odd turn yesterday when it was revealed that Democratic frontrunner Richard Blumenthal, the state’s Attorney General, lied about having served in Vietnam.

“I don’t think he’s going to have to drop out, but I think this is going to derail him in terms of his message, and set everything kind of upside down for at least a week,” said Cameron, adding that polls over the next two weeks will show the real impact. “If he bails out of the race, that could very well put that seat in play for Republicans to win.”

Blumenthal’s apology/excuse for lying was that he “misplaced words,” which, besides being totally offensive to veterans, is so stupid that it’s offensive to anybody anywhere with a brain.

-Julie Kanfer