Five-term Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, the leading 2010 Senate candidate prospect for Illinois' Republicans, avoided one big hurdle with the withdrawal of a potentially strong challenger for Feburary's GOP primary.

But even with Monday's decision by state GOP Chairman Andy McKenna to step aside, it may be a while before it's clear whether Kirk will be able to completely avoid serious primary competition -- from a candidate backed by conservatives who are not thrilled with Kirk's record as one of the more centrist Republicans in the House.

The Senate contest in Illinois, which has the earliest 2010 primary of any state, will in fact be an indicator of how "pragmatic" the party's conservative base is willing to be in an effort to regain some of the massive amount of ground the party lost in the past two election cycles -- particularly in states such as Illinois, that have been trending strongly Democratic.

Al Franken is liable to surprise and disappoint a lot of people who expect him to be the cut-up of the Senate Class of 2008.

That applies both to liberals who would like to see him unsheath the rhetorical sledgehammer he often applied to conservative icons such as George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter, and to conservatives who envision Franken reverting to shtick and embarrassing the Democrats in Washington and back in Minnesota.

The clue here is the very sober demeanor that Franken projected virtually throughout his Senate campaign, his first bid for public office after many years of backing liberal causes.

The Republicans who consider themselves possible contenders for their party's 2012 presidential nomination may have their eyes fixed on the political horizon. But they probably should be watching their backs, too.

This was brought to mind by comments that Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu made on national TV about Bobby Jindal -- her home state's governor -- who, at age 38, is widely regarded as one of the Republican Party's rising stars and a possible 2012 prospect.

Landrieu, appearing on C-SPAN's "American Morning", said, "Well, if he would stay home in Louisiana a little more and focus on being governor that would be wonderful."

Peter Schiff is a investor and financial analyst who has gotten plenty of face time on national television, thanks to the fact that he accurately predicted the decline of the nation's financial sector.

During an appearance Tuesday on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to plug his book, "Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse," Schiff revealed that he is "potentially considering" running as a Republican against vulnerable Connecticut Democratic Sen. Christopher J. Dodd -- the Senate Banking Committee chairman whose ties to the financial industry are causing him political headaches as he prepares to run for a sixth Senate term.

But if he were to run, Schiff would be asking Connecticut residents to do something he claims he doesn't make a habit. Namely voting.

Democratic Sen. Christopher J. Dodd is going all high-techie in the discussion of health care reform.

A press release sent out by his office Friday morning announced that Dodd, in his role as a senior member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and chairman of its Subcommittee on Children and Families, "is soliciting feedback from constituents on how best to reform our nation's health care system as part of YouTube's Senator of the Week feature." Dodd "is asking YouTube users from Connecticut and across the country to record their ideas and present them to Congress via the YouTube Senate Hub."

Ah, now, if he had just caught the YouTube bug during his brief, ill-fated campaign for the 2008 presidential campaign. One of the reasons Dodd appears vulnerable in his 2010 re-election campaign is that he spent weeks prior to Iowa's first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses scouring that state -- and even moved his wife and kids to Des Moines for the duration.

Had he communicated with Iowa voters by You Tube, maybe -- just maybe -- he would have kept everyone's nose in joint back home in Connecticut. And it's hard to imagine the outcome being any different, since Dodd earned one out of about 2,500 delegates to the Iowa state convention, based on the caucus voting.

Republican officials, groping for a formula for party revival, have been firing up their conservative activist base with support for "tea parties" that skewer big government and rhetoric that brands President Barack Obama's Democratic Party as "Socialist."

At the same time, though, GOP strategists have been working to recruit candidates for key 2010 elections who project at least somewhat moderate images that might draw them support across party lines -- making them, at least in theory, more "electable."

This is proving to be no easy balancing act -- as underscored by a rising conservative backlash to the GOP establishment's efforts to clear the Florida Senate primary field for Republican Gov. Charlie Crist.

Both parties caught the attention of our hyperbole monitors today...

Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist made a much-ballyhooed announcement this morning that he'll run for his state's open Senate seat next year -- and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wasted little time before releasing a barbed statement that essentially blames Crist for the impact of the national recession on his state.

The Democrats' broadside notes that unemployment in Florida under Crist's watch is above the national average, that the state has the second highest home foreclosure rate in the nation, and that the recently passed Florida budget raises taxes and cuts some social services to address a $6 billion gap.

OK, all's fair in politics. But the governor's seats in some other states with exceptionally high unemployment, such as Michigan and Ohio, are being defended by the Democratic Party. Is the DCCC suggesting that the Democratic incumbents there are responsible for the dire impacts of the recession? Of course not... but you can bet the Republicans will respond in kind there.

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After more than 230 years of nationhood, you would think that our politics would have run out of new wrinkles. But listening to Republicans and other critics outraged over Arlen Specter's jump to the Democratic Party, you might conclude that the Pennsylvania senator just invented the idea of party-switching in the service of self-advancement.

Of course, that's not true. Not by a long shot.

One of the most unintentionally funny reactions to Specter's political bombshell came in a fundraising e-mail sent out last week by the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP's campaign arm. The pitch was aimed at raising money to elect more House Republicans to counteract a Democratic-dominated Senate (a missive that also underscored the fact that there is hardly any event, whether good or bad for a party, that cannot be parlayed into a fundraising opportunity).