Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

This could be bad news.  Catastrophically bad news.  Former NARAL chair Kate Michelman says she may run for Pennsylvania Senate as a third party independent candidate:

How angry was Michelman?

The veteran activist, who has lived for almost three decades in Pennsylvania, might just jump into the Senate race herself.

"After Casey announced his support for Alito, I got calls from around the country," says Michelman in a Legal Times article on the fallout from the Alito fight. She tells Legal Times that she has been urged by Democratic donors and feminist groups to run this fall as a pro-choice independent challenger to anti-choice Republican Santorum and anti-choice Democrat Casey.

If Michaelman runs, she'll do nothing but split the Democratic vote and assure a Santorum victory.  If she was really serious about furthering the pro-choice agenda, she would have gotten in gear months ago and run against Casey in the Democratic primary.  Doing the third party spoiler thing now, by contrast, will return Santorum to the Senate, and therefore assure a continued Republican Senate majority.  Such an outcome will not only set the pro-choice movement back, but also hurt progressive causes on civil liberties, labor, the environment, health care, and pretty much every other progressive cause you can think of (goodbye NSA wiretap hearings, hello retroactive authorization of unsupervised NSA domestic spying, for example).  

Let's hope Michaelman pulls back on this foul trial balloon.  No one is asking her to campaign for Casey.  We're just asking her to do no harm.