Spotlight on Angle

After surging to victory in last week's Republican Senate primary, former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle chose to avoid the limelight for a few days.

Given what she's sure to face over the coming five months, that's certainly understandable.

Ms. Angle's race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be perhaps the country's most scrutinized campaign of 2010. Sen. Reid and his liberal surrogates have already telegraphed their strategy: Paint Ms. Angle, a favorite of the Tea Party movement, as a radical right-wing kook better suited for the loony bin than the U.S. Senate.

Will that work? Perhaps. Sen. Reid faces an uphill climb -- the latest Rasmussen poll shows Ms. Angle with a 50-39 lead and the four-term Democrat has a virtually fatal "unfavorable" rating among Nevada voters.

But five months is an eternity in politics -- recall that just two or three months before the June 8 GOP primary, Ms. Angle was running a distant third, mired in single digits.

Sen. Reid and his various front groups have been rubbing their hands in anticipation of attacking Ms. Angle for taking "extreme" positions on entitlements, the size of the federal government and other issues. But Ms. Angle must avoid the temptation to react defensively, because most of her positions are eminently defensible.

On Social Security, for instance, Ms. Angle has previously embraced allowing young Americans to invest a portion of their contributions in their own private accounts. She also favors more market-oriented reforms for struggling Medicare. These are not radical positions. In fact, which is more dangerous, implementing Ms. Angle's proposals or covering your eyes -- as Sen. Reid has done for more than two decades in Washington -- to the fact that these entitlement programs threaten to bankrupt the nation in the near future?

Some Democrats also chortle over Ms. Angle's suggestion that the Department of Education be eliminated. But the real joke is that this money-soaking federal agency -- created as a sop to the teacher unions by President Jimmy Carter -- has done virtually nothing to improve the state of American education since its inception in 1977. Ronald Reagan rode to victory in 1980 on a platform that included shuttering this useless bureaucracy, and Ms. Angle shouldn't be shy about advocating that the billions of dollars it runs through each year would be better left in local hands. Again, let Sen. Reid defend the status quo.

Finally, some "progressive" types have highlighted an interview Ms. Angle gave awhile back in which she listed alcohol along with marijuana among the drugs she is "not a real proponent of legalizing." This, they postulate, reveals her Neanderthal tendencies and a dangerous streak of social conservatism. But this is a non-issue. The country isn't about to repeat the failed alcohol experiment of the 1920s. On the other hand, many of those guffawing over Ms. Angle's comments are at the forefront of the very real and successful movement to gradually outlaw tobacco. No shortage of hypocrisy there.

If she hopes to win, Ms. Angle must aggressively defend the tenets that have helped mobilize millions of Americans across the country to protest business as usual in Washington. In the face of the inevitable withering attacks, she must not back down from championing economic freedom, spending restraint and reimposing constitutional limits on the federal government.

That will allow her to emphasize the many areas in which she differs with Sen. Harry Reid, a career politician who has been the Senate's water boy for the unpopular, hyperleftist Obama agenda that threatens to tax and spend the nation into collapse -- an agenda that actively seeks to transform the United States from a constitutional republic into a "socially just," mediocre, cradle-to-grave welfare state.

The contrast for voters couldn't be more stark.