Over the moon with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Morning Joe this morning. She was superb.

[karynnj]

64. I agree

I think he was not so much lazy or stupid, but insufficiently concerned that he could lose. It may be that he felt that he was well known enough and popular enough in his district that he could blow off the challenge. He actually was in his district at another event at the time of the debate.

One parallel was a similar loss on the Republican side a few years ago. Eric Cantor, was a media favorite, strongly pushed to be a future Speaker -- when he lost to Representative Brat, a tea partier, who argued he spent little time in his district and was more interested in moving ahead in the party.

I hope I conveyed the respect that I have for Reid/Baucus who really threaded a needle there and were able to pass legislation - even though there was only a narrow interval of 4 months where we had 60 Senators -- and only because Kennedy wrote asking the MA legislature to change the law changed in 2004 to allow Patrick to immediately pick an interim Senator and Kerry argued for it before the MA legislature which changed the 2004 law. Otherwise that seat would have been vacant for those 4 months.