Elizabeth Dole, R-NC

Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina may be best known in some circles for being married to a former Senator, but she’s no stranger to the Washington power elite in her own right. She’s another single-term Senator who flip-flopped from donkey to elephant like Coleman did, though she did it much earlier in her long climb to the top. She was originally a Democrat who had campaigned for JFK in 1960, and then moved to Washington to work for Lyndon Johnson’s administration a few years afterwards.

When Nixon came to power and took LBJ’s place in the White House, Dole opted to stay the course and work for him instead. She finally made it official and switched over to the GOP side of the fence in 1975, and she’s continued to be one of the most reliable rank-and-file Republicans ever since. She’s got a lot of old-school GOP street cred, having been Secretary Labor, a FTC commissioner, and a Presidential candidate for the 2000 cycle. And she’s always ready to be old-school obstructionist when the party’s power brokers tell her to.

Dole was the first woman chairperson of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, but during the 2006 election cycle her Democratic counterpart Chuck Schumer outraised her in the funding department and outdid her in the electoral politics department. That gave the dubious distinction of handing over nominal control of the Senate to the Democratic Party in a year when nobody had expected that to happen. Perhaps that’s also why she’s more than willing to follow the narrow-minded Roadblock Republican agenda that’s designed to frustrate that narrow majority at every turn.

Bi-partisan? Not hardly. There’s a reason that Dole was elected to succeed Jesse Helms, another famous old-school obstructionist of the first water, when he finally retired. She’s never going to go against the grain and stand against her party or its programs. North Carolina is long overdue for some new-school blood in 2008 instead — and that new blood should be True Blue this time, too.