Mike Bennet wins!

Seems to have been a decent night for Democrats with today's primaries. I was particularly happy that Senator Michael Bennet has won a tough primary contest. Evidently this has become a rather silly intra-progressive fight, but the case for Bennet seems pretty simple to me:

1. He's got a background running a big-city school system, which will be valuable for decades to come in crafting education policy.
2. He's quite young for a senator. He's 45 right now, which means he'll ideally have about 30 years to gather seniority and become a force, which compounds reason one.
3. He's already the incumbent, which gives him a bit of an advantage in a tough election year.

To me, this adds up to a pretty compelling argument. I've long believed that one of the big problems with Congress is that there are too many generalists and not enough specialists, and too many of those generalists are lawyers, which is a mentality that is fine enough when you need to know what the law is or how to read or write it, but that is suited terribly to solving public policy problems. I always go back to H.L. Mencken's argument about how lawyers apply so much energy to such trivial problems (like finding obscure loopholes) that it's the equivalent of the world's finest mathematicians all trying to find the precise odds on a long-shot horse in the Kentucky Derby. This isn't to say that lawyers can't see the big picture, but in my experience they aren't trained to, nor are they encouraged to. I like the idea of people with actual skill sets hanging out in Congress. Plus, Bennet's opponent struck me as a pretty slimy guy, so there's that too.

In any event, I'm happy that Bennet won, and I can only hope that he continues to serve Colorado for some time to come.