Flake was supposed to sail through the GOP primary without lifting a finger, after which he would go on to to crush Democrat Richard Carmona, a former Navy officer and former U.S. surgeon general, in the still right-leaning state.

But a new PPP poll out yesterday may have some Republicans worried, as Flake’s Republican opponent Wil Cardon has hacked 27 points off of Flake’s lead in just three months. Flake is still comfortably ahead by 22 points, but it’s nothing compared to the nearly 50-point lead he had back in February.

In Cardon, Flake is facing a surprisingly tough challenge from not only a political neophyte who has never held public office before, but a birther. When the Arizona Republic asked Cardon whether he believes Obama has sufficiently proven his citizenship, Cardon wouldn’t say, responding only, “I think people who run for office … ought to prove that they meet those qualifications.”

The poll shows Cardon’s rise has to do with his growing name recognition in the state. And while an early round of advertising certainly helped, it’s likely nothing helped as much to raise Cardon’s profile as his birther-curious comments a month ago, which captured national headlines and introduced Cardon to many people for the first time.

And Arizona, more than any other state, has been leading the charge against Obama’s birth certificate. The state legislature has advanced a Donald Trump-backed “birther bill” every spring since the president took office, which would require presidential candidates to present a long-form birth certificate before they can appear on the ballot. An Arizona State University poll from earlier this month found 60 percent of Arizonans support the bill.

Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed 2011’s version, which passed the state Senate 20 to 9 and the House 40 to 16, specifically objecting to a provision asking candidates to provide “circumcision certificates,” but it was reintroduced last month thanks to its popularity.

Just last week, Arizona’s Secretary of State Ken Bennett — who is a state co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — formally requested the state of Hawaii provide proof that Obama’s birth certificate is indeed valid, explaining to a local radio station,”I’m not a birther. I believe the president was born in Hawaii — or at least I hope he was.”

But perhaps no one has done as much to advance the birther cause as Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who, it was revealed yesterday, used taxpayer dollars to send a deputy to Hawaii to investigate Obama’s birth certificate.

While it’s tempting to look at Cardon’s rise in the paradigm of the insurgent Tea Partier against the establishment-backed GOP, Flake is a favorite of the far-right grassroots movement, securing the endorsement of kingmaker Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and several Tea Party groups.

Nonetheless, Cardon’s surge could trouble some Republicans still smarting from back-to-back upsets in Indiana and Nebraska, where insurgents Richard Mourdock and Deb Fischer defeated candidates favored by the GOP establishment and even DeMint, respectively.

Flake, however, has been clear that he believes Obama is indeed a U.S. citizen, much to the chagrin of birthers. And while it’s difficult to say with certainty if Cardon can credit his flirtation with birtherism for his rise in the polls, there’s been a startling uptick in the number of Republicans questioning Obama’s citizenship as the 2012 elections have ramped up.

North Carolina alone has seen a handful of GOP congressional candidates railing against Obama’s “poorly reproduced forgery” of a birth certificate, while even some GOP leaders such as Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), who has led the charge against Solyndra and Planned Parenthood, have waded into the birther myth. Meanwhile, a PPP poll from March found that more than a third of GOP primary voters in Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio do not believe Obama was born in Hawaii.

How else to read this third wave of the birther myth but that it sells among many GOP voters?

Fischer and Mourdock were first eligible to vote for president in 1972. That year, while Richard Nixon was sweeping to a landslide victory, 29-year-old Joe Biden was winning a Senate seat in Delaware; he wouldn’t even be eligible for the office until his birthday on Nov. 20. He’s about nine years older than them, but by January he’ll have completed a four-year term as vice president … after his 36-year run in the world’s most exclusive – and rapidly aging – club.

And that, in a nutshell, is a sign of one way the United States Senate has changed over the last several decades.

It’s fairly well known, I think, that the average age of members of Congress has been growing older and older over time. While the current 112th Congress turned slightly in the younger direction, before that virtually every Congress for some time broke records for age, with the 111th  Senate peaking at an average of 63.1 years.

But what’s not been reported as far as I know is that one of the big factors in the aging of the Senate is in part a consequence not of high reelection rates or delayed retirement from senators too stubborn to quit, but of changes among incoming senators. Of course, not all newly elected senators are as old as Fischer and Mourdock, and Joe Biden was hardly typical of the 1970s, but as symbols of the change, you could do worse.

Let’s go to the numbers. I looked at the three most recent classes of senators, and four famous elections from the past: the Republican Revolution of 1994; the Reagan takeover of the Senate in 1980; the Watergate babies elected in 1974; and, stretching further back, the famous class of 1958, who would reform Congress and pass civil rights and Great Society legislation. In each case, I only looked at those elected in regular November elections of those years, ignoring those elected or appointed within election cycles (many of those, after all, are just caretakers who rapidly leave the Senate).

First, the recent groups. In 2006, the Democrats took over the Senate, and 10 new senators were elected. Their average age: 54.2 years. The next cycle was also good for the Democrats. Another 10 new senators showed up, with a whopping average age of 56.6. And then Republicans stormed back in 2010; the 13 new senators from that cycle were a slightly younger 52.8. Looking at individual senators, I count 10 of those 33 senators who reached their 60th birthdays before taking the oath of office – which also means that all of them would be on the far side of 65 before their terms expired.

Things look very different if we go back only a few years. The Clinton-era class of 1995 had 11 senators who averaged 48.8 years old. The 18-strong Reagan class of 1981 was only 46.7 years old, while the 10 aptly named Watergate babies tipped the clock at just 45.5 years, over a decade less than those sworn in at the beginning of the Obama presidency. Going way back to 1959, that illustrious group of 18 was just over an average of 50, thanks to the two oldest new senators in the whole study, 69-year-old Stephen Young of Ohio and Ernest Gruening, who was one of Alaska’s first two senators. However, and while I haven’t looked any further, those two look like total flukes; they are the only two 60-year-olds that year, and there are none at all in the Watergate and Reagan groups.

And Mourdock and Fischer are just par for the course in the current election cycle, which features strong contenders David Dewhurst of Texas (he’ll be 67 in January 2013), George Allen in Virginia (60), Angus King in Maine (67) and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts (63). Or look at Hawaii: In the Democratic primary, Ed Case (60) and Mazie Hirono (65) are contending to take on Linda Lingle (59). And I really don’t think Tommy Thompson is going to win in Wisconsin (I doubt he’ll make it through the primary), but if he does make it he’ll be 71 years old at the beginning of his term. And those are only the candidates with very good chances of winning.

Now, I certainly don’t have anything against individual older senators. Plenty of members of Congress have been excellent legislators in their 60s and even 70s. But I do think that there’s something wrong when most new senators in 2010 were out of college (where they wrote their term papers on typewriters) before Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five unleashed the Message; perhaps more to the point, we’re still electing lots of new senators who grew up with Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the background, and hardly any who reached college when the Cold War was history instead of current events. Especially since many senators have said that it takes a full term for them to get fully up to speed – and after a full term, many of our recent new senators are on the far side of 70.

I really don’t have an explanation for why we’re nominating and electing much older Senate candidates these days, but I think it’s an unfortunate trend that can’t make for better representation or for a more engaged and active Senate. I’d like to see more senators in their 30s (and, yes, even in their 20s, ideally). I have no idea how to get there, but if the first part of solving a problem is to identify it, I hope this helps. If young people want Washington to be more receptive to their problems — from climate to student-loan debt — one solution might be to start electing people closer to their own ages.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, Paul declined to endorse Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who endorsed Paul in 2008. Johnson was, formerly, the Republican presidential candidate all those young “liberal” college stoner Ron Paul supporters should have gone with if they’d wanted to support a candidate who believed strongly in liberty but who wasn’t a racist Alex Jonesian conspiracy-mongering goldbug loon. But Johnson had “extensive executive experience” instead of a blimp and a sweet logo, so he did not win over many Paul fanatics.

Ron Paul’s strategy seems to be a gradual takeover of the Republican Party itself, instead of attempting to build a Libertarian alternative to the GOP. I think he’ll find that he can get the party to happily sign on, at least rhetorically, to his fiscal message, as they continue to ignore his popular and populist isolationism and his eminently agreeable but politically untenable positions on criminal justice and civil liberties, forever. The party, in other words, will continue to co-opt whatever they find electorally useful about the Paul phenomenon, as the Tea Party movement stole his iconography and messaging wholesale while attaching it to the same religious-right/nativist sentiment that has driven the party’s activist base for decades.

But Paul thinks the future lies with his son Rand, who shares many of his father’s enthusiasms and beliefs while also appearing to be more acceptable to the mainstream. Various Paul allies and a few other Republicans strongly suggest that Rand is gearing up for a 2016 run; which would mean, of course, that they expect Romney to lose, but that they need to not appear to be rooting for Romney to lose.

The problem is that what makes Rand Paul more acceptable to the mainstream of the Republican Party is what makes him more repellent than his father. Take, for example, Rand Paul’s funny joke this last weekend about Barack Obama and gay marriage.

The president recently weighed in on marriage. And, you know, he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical but I wasn’t sure that his views on marriage could get any gayer. Now it did kind of bother me, though, that he used the justification for it in a biblical reference. He said the biblical Golden Rule caused him to be for gay marriage …

And I’m like: What version of the Bible is he reading? It’s not the King James version. It’s not the New American Standard. It’s not the New Revised version. I don’t know what version he is getting it from.

Haha Barack Obama is so gay, he should read a Bible for once. Libertarianism!

Nick Gillespie, of the libertarian Reason Magazine, does not get this joke. The crowd, at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, did seem to get it, or at least they appreciated it. But Rand sounds very different when he speaks to Iowa conservatives than he does when interviewed by Gillespie and Matt Welch. (His address received a nice notice from Robert Costa of the National Review, who did not mention his funny joke.)

While Rand Paul may be, as Gillespie says, the most libertarian senator, he is also not an actual libertarian, as demonstrated by his support for anti-constitutional anti-immigrant legislation and his very vocal antiabortion position. He is also a dumb lout, and I tend to think that having the Senate’s most libertarian member be a dumb lout is not actually that good for the Libertarian movement. When he makes explicitly libertarian arguments, he makes them dumbly. When he goes all anti-gay talk-radio bigot culture warrior, which he does increasingly frequently, he does so dumbly. (If he wants to be a mainstream politician and presidential contender, it was certainly dumb to appear — more than once — on the radio program of Truther/Birther/New World Orderer/every-other-conspiracy promoter Alex Jones, but for some reason he almost entirely escaped mainstream press scrutiny for these appearances.) While I don’t feel much affection for Ron Paul, he seems both significantly smarter and leagues more principled than his son the senator.

If the “electable” face of libertarianism is a fratty anti-gay, anti-choice nitwit like Rand Paul, I will stick with socialism, thank you. And I wonder if the Paul family’s plan is to promote “liberty” or to promote the Paul family.

The Senate’s three most predictable and least credible warmongering “moderates” frequently join forces to publish joint Op-Eds or hold press conferences and the one thing they always, invariably want is for the United States to have just a little bit more war than it currently has, somewhere far away. Sure, we could draw down in Iraq … or we could listen to McCain, Lieberman and Graham and draw back up. We could draw down in Afghanistan … or we could stay the course and keep sending troops there until we win! Americans may be tired of endless war with no coherent goal, but on the other hand, “only decisive force can prevail in [whatever country John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman are talking about now].”

As the Hill recently explained in a story on how John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman were pushing for a resolution basically promising to make war with Iran, “Graham, Lieberman and McCain are considered some of the top foreign policy experts in the upper chamber,” because they always, invariably support military intervention everywhere for any reason, and that is invariably considered a sign of “seriousness” in Washington. If you don’t like waging wars everywhere, forever, you are a weird kooky hippie, and everyone laughs at you. If you believe that bombs and troops have the power to magically solve all problems, you are invited on all the Sunday shows every week to offer your sober analysis of the foreign situation.

You just never know which country these three will decide needs bombing next! One time the three amigos also took a trip to Tripoli to hang out with Moammar Gadhafi. (They invited Susan Collins along, though usually their sleepover parties are strictly “no girls allowed.”) Sadly, by April of last year, they were no longer friends with Gadhafi, and the three had decided that the United States should assassinate him. (That is not really legal but, you know, “war on terror” and “serious, muscular foreign policy” or something.)

One time Lieberman and Graham tried to hang out with a different senator and they all came up with an idea that didn’t involve bombing anyone but that made McCain mad and he yelled at them. Don’t hang out with John Kerry and try to solve climate change! Hang out with me and let’s try to convince everyone to bomb Russia or something!

Sadly, Joe Lieberman will be leaving the U.S. Senate soon, which means John McCain and Lindsey Graham will need to find a new fake-Democrat best friend to add a patina of “bipartisanship” to their endless demands for explosions and shooting and death.

This is how bad things have gotten: President Obama hasn’t called her in almost two years!

If there were ever a Republican for President Obama to work with, it was Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. She was one of just three Republicans in the entire Congress to vote for his economic stimulus plan in 2009 and even tried to work with him on health care, but in an interview with ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl, Snowe makes a remarkable revelation: She hasn’t hasn’t spoken to President Obama in nearly two years.

Snowe said that if she had to grade the President on his willingness to work with Republicans, he would “be close to failing on that point.” In fact, Snowe, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, claims that her meetings with President Obama have been less frequent than with any other president.

That’s so weird, that President Obama stopped talking to her around two years ago. I wonder what happened? That wizard probably got him, and now he hates bipartisanship. That is the only explanation I can think of for why Olympia Snowe — a Republican the president could definitely try to work with! — hasn’t heard from Obama for around two years.

I mean, Snowe “even tried to work with him on health care.” Hey, that was around two years ago, actually! How hard did she try, again? If I recall correctly, she intentionally delayed the process for months before finally voting against a plan she’d previously voted for, never making a single substantive criticism of the policy of the bill in the fear that her criticism would then be addressed by Democrats and she’d be forced to come up with a new reason to oppose the bill, because it turns out she didn’t actually want to vote for healthcare reform, and she would not have supported any plan to expand coverage to all Americans, no matter how it worked.

So this is the problem. In the popular imagination, and in Barack Obama’s naive pre-2010 fantasies, “bipartisanship” means “working together to accomplish things.” In reality, in the Senate, it means “indulging moderates, forever.” For Olympia Snowe, the act of calling Olympia Snowe is more important than the act of … passing legislation to solve problems.

Snowe is now endorsing Scott Brown, saying Massachusetts residents should vote for him because he is another true believer in independent, party line-crossing bipartisanship. He even supports the Violence Against Women Act! (Why should Massachusetts residents vote for a Republican who is willing to cross party lines sometimes to vote for bills that every Democrat supports, instead of just voting for a Democrat whose support you won’t have to just sort of guess at until he comes out and says it? Because “bipartisanship,” that’s why.) (And the fact that Brown supported allowing employers to deny contraception coverage — a measure Snowe opposed — while his opponents shared Snowe’s position on the issue also doesn’t matter, because being a Republican who sometimes bucks the party line to do the right thing is more Honorable than being a Democrat whose party line is already the right thing.)

Would Olympia Snowe have voted for cap-and-trade if the president had called her more often? Or would she have done exactly what she did during the healthcare reform process, and strung Democrats along for months before voting against it for nakedly political reasons? (She was beginning to play the exact same game as she had before, saying she would maybe bring herself to support a “scaled-back” version of the legislation as long as other Republicans also promised to do so.)

Would Olympia Snowe have supported the “scaled-back,” less ambitious alternative to comprehensive immigration reform that was the DREAM Act, which would have allowed people who came to the U.S. as children and served in the military or went to college to seek citizenship legally? No, she would not have, because if the act had passed, “millions of illegal immigrants could attempt to become legal residents….”

So instead of cap-and-trade, we got nothing. Instead of the DREAM Act, we got nothing. If healthcare reform had failed, we’d have nothing. If Snowe’s stated goal was to maintain the status quo, because she doesn’t care about immigration and doesn’t believe in climate change, then she’d be totally doing a very good job. But she claims to care about climate change and want to do something about immigration, which leads me to believe that she’s horrible at being a senator. It is the incompetent political maneuvering of “moderates” like Snowe, and not “partisanship,” that leads directly to Senate inaction. If what she needed, in order to be swayed to the side of passing legislation to address problems, was for the president to make a much bigger public show of courting her, then she’s a bizarre and repulsive specimen. Being against everything because people aren’t paying you enough attention is so much worse than being against everything on principle.