First thing that popped into my head when I saw this tweet* about Greg Charlie Crist Orman:

When I talked to orman, he dodged on keystone, fed min wage hike, same sex marriage (1/2)

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) September 29, 2014

…and this Washington Post article, listing the stuff that Greg Orman doesn’t want to get into.

Greenlight the Keystone XL pipeline? Orman said he doesn’t have enough information to say yes or no.

What about gun control? He said gun restrictions should be “strengthened” but would not specify whether he backs an assault-weapons ban.

And on the biggest question of all — Would he caucus with Democrats or Republicans? — Orman insists he’s not sure.

“It’s not in the best interests for us to say that,” Orman said in an interview here last week.

Bolding mine. You know, Charlie Crist over in Florida made it a point to highlight the fact that if you don’t like what he has to say, then Charlie Crist will stand on his principles – until they rupture under the weight, thus freeing him up to adopt new principles more to your liking. And that strategy of Crist’s worked. For a while.  It’s not working particularly well now.

Mind you, it’s not a particularly bad strategy to try to not take a position on anything… normally. In this particular case Orman has misjudged the situation. His basic hope for success is in convincing enough conservatives to vote for him; and to do that, he has to present himself as a convincing conservative alternative to Pat Roberts. Which means that he should have endorsed the Keystone Pipeline, told the interviewer What part of Shall not be infringed is unclear?, and said that he’d be caucusing with the Republicans whether they took the Senate or not. Because Kansans don’t want the Democrats running things all their own way anymore.

What’s that? If Greg Orman does that, then all of his Democratic funding just shrivels up and blows away on the wind? Well. Isn’t that a thing.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Part two was a list of all the stuff that Orman is currently pretending to be ‘bipartisan’ about. Needless to say, the Democratic leadership would break him of all of that in a heartbeat, because that’s what the Democratic leadership does. They lie, and then they make other people lie.