First of all: Too much is being made of the fact that the GOP has not held this district since Reconstruction. Until I read that today, I had not realized it. It’s true, but only an accident of history: Griffith won the seat after the retirement of Bud Cramer, who had represented the district since prior to the 1994 Gingrich Congress. If memory serves, Cramer did not have significant Republican opposition when he won his first term (it used to be the case that the Alabama Republican Party only fielded candidates in the handful of races that they thought they were most likely to win). After that, he kept winning re-election because he did a good job of concentrating on the issues that the district cares about. People weren’t voting for a Democratic candidate; they were voting for Bud Cramer.

Griffith won the seat last year in part due to an endorsement from Cramer, who is still thought highly of here. The other major factor was that Griffith’s Republican opponent, Wayne Parker, ran a terrible campaign. Parker’s campaign consisted mainly of attacking Griffith personally, accusing him of (among other things) malpractice in his medical practice. Someone forget to tell Parker that this district’s voters hate mud-slinging politicians. I’ve seen it many times here in local races: the apparent front-runner decides to engage in mudslinging, and the underdog wins. If you want to win in this district, you’d better stick to the issues.

So Griffith’s party affiliation played very little part in his winning the election; if anything, it probably hurt him some. But as a Democrat, Griffith probably felt like he had to show at least some party unity to prevent important military projects in the district from being threatened. As it turns out, that party loyalty did no good on that score; those programs are threatened anyway. So there is no longer any motivation for him to try to make nice with the Democrats.

Huntsville is an engineering town. It’s often said that you can’t throw a rock here without hitting a Ph.D. People here have done the math and they don’t have any patience with the sort of government gimcrack that the Democrats are peddling. Griffith knows that. As a Republican, he may not be the most conservative person in Congress, but he will definitely be at least to the right of the McCain faction. He definitely won’t be a RINO — the district’s voters won’t stand for that. As far as I’m concerned, the Fifth District just got an early Christmas present.

I voted for Wayne Parker in 2008, but I did so mainly because party affiliation matters, not because I thought Parker would be a particularly good Congressman. There’s talk that Griffith may face a primary challenge from Parker and at least one other person in 2010. As a voter, I say bring it on; if nothing else, it will give Griffith a better idea of what the voters are expecting from him.