In the days leading up to “Super Senate Tuesday” national political reporters and pundits were but all but wetting their thongs, boxers and briefs waiting for a voter backlash against incumbents, or an oracular sign that the teabaggers are taking over the Republican Party.  They got neither.  T-man Rand Paul won the Kentucky Republican Primary because his opponent had all the charisma of a 240-pound cow-chip.  And Democratic incumbent Senators Arlen Spector and Blanche Lincoln lost and are losing their primaries in Pennsylvania and Arkansas because voters  perceived them as political lizards, and not the cute little green kind  that sells auto insurance on TV.  

I thought MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell was going to collapse from apoplexy as she reported her old  friend Sen. Spector had been taken off life support, victim of a vicious media mugging by Congressman Joe Sestak and left for dead by his friends in the White House.  Truth is, Spector took himself out over a year ago when he became America’s all-time maximum political chameleon by switching parties for the second time in his lengthy career.

 The Obama Administration and the unions stuck by Spector despite long-time affections for Sestak because they had to in order to preserve their deal-making integrity with other members of Congress.  The ultimate old boy had delivered on health care reform and the Recovery Act and was about to reverse field and once again support Employee Free Choice, which is still at the top of labor’s must-list. 

 The voters of Pennsylvania harbored no similar respect for or obligation to Spector.  All they saw was a man who’d changed his coat from blue to red in order to get elected in the first place, then changed it back in a grasping late-life exhibition of situational ethics. Dem voters wanted a donkey they could ride, not one they could count on just to carry occasionally odiferous baggage. This was a definite case of fool me once, fool me twice.

 Blanche Lincoln isn’t down for the count yet — she goes into a primary runoff with Arkansas Lieutenant Gov. Bill Halter with a 45-44 lead.  But she can’t buck the proven political axiom that incumbents max out the first time around.  She’ll lose not because she changed the color of her coat, but because she rotated the baffling ante bellum hats she wears one too many times.  She was elected as a moderate democrat with liberal leanings.  She took early positions in favor of a brand of  health care that included a public option and she co-sponsored Employee Free Choice.  But as barriers to her e-election began to look like giant Jersey Walls, she abandoned her commitments to both.

 The labor unions have less tolerance for lackluster lackeys than voters do, and they are savaging Lincoln on the doors and on television.  And conservative Dems aren’t likely to forgive her for one last ideological pirouette in favor of tougher Wall Street reform.  She loses 60-40.

 New lessons for the mid-term elections?  Not many.  But for candidates, old ones re-learned may include “dance with the one than brung you” and “hell hath no fury.”