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Robert Byrd's Vanity.

Mark Noonan of Blogs for Bush points out this story, which explains that West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd has at least one challenger for his seat in 2006:

State Republican Party Treasurer Hiram Lewis IV announced Saturday he planned to seek his party's nomination.

The event would have been entirely ho-hum but for the ominous statue of Robert Byrd hovering above Lewis:

Citizens Against Government Waste explains that the statue is not only incredibly vain, it "violates state law prohibiting statues of government officials until they have been dead for half a century."

While Kerfuffles blog notes that this is merely par for the course for Byrd, The Right Wing Nuthouse explains just one of many reasons the statue is just plain wrong:

It’s unseemly for us to immortalize sitting politicians. Makes us look like a banana republic or worse, a decrepit relic from the cold war Soviet Union where we got used to seeing pictures of a young, vigorous Brezhnev all over Moscow while the real thing was wasting away to mummyhood.

The statue underscores just how entrenched Byrd is in his position; the Byrd machine runs West Virginia; the Byrd mythology is boundless.

To say that Hiram Lewis (or anyone else) faces an uphill battle against the hand that feeds West Virginia would be the political understatement of the year.

Nonetheless, pride goes before the fall, and Robert Byrd's enormous vanity could prove to be the (minuscule) window of opportunity for his undoing.

UPDATE:

Patrick Ruffini (via PoliPundit) has more on Robert Byrd-related polling.

Posted by Will Franklin · 11 April 2005 06:00 AM

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