“Eaten By The Tiger”: Eric Cantor And The Tea Party Purge
In 1961, John F. Kennedy said: “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”
In November of 2010, Eric Cantor said: “The Tea Party are … an organic movement that played a tremendously positive role in this election. I mean, certainly, it produced an outcome beneficial to our party when you’re picking up at least 60-some seats.”
Yes, Republican leaders happily rode the Tea Party tiger when doing so was convenient. Now, Cantor has fallen to the very forces he and his colleagues unleashed and encouraged. After an electoral earthquake that shocked the party’s system, the GOP’s top brass will be scrambling to figure out what lessons they should draw.
Unfortunately, they’ll probably absorb the wrong ones. Rather than taking on the Tea Party and battling for a more moderate and popular form of conservatism, they are likely to cower and accommodate even more.
Because immigration was a central issue used against Cantor by David Brat, the insurgent professor who defeated him by 11 points, the immediate betting is that House leaders will once and for all declare immigration reform dead for this session of Congress. Governing is likely to become even less important, if that’s possible, to House Speaker John Boehner. Just holding a fearful and fractious GOP caucus together will become an even greater preoccupation.
It might usefully occur to some Republicans that Cantor was not their party’s only incumbent challenged by the Tea Party in a primary on Tuesday. In South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham overwhelmed six Tea Party challengers, securing 57 percent of the vote and avoiding a runoff.
While it’s true that Graham did what he could to satisfy his party’s ultras — for long stretches, it seemed that not a day went by when he didn’t use the word “Benghazi” — he did not, as Cantor did, twist this way and that on the immigration question. On the contrary, Graham defended his support of immigration reform and his vote for a bipartisan Senate bill.
We’ll never know if Cantor would have done better if he had held steady on the subject. What we do know is that sending out campaign literature bragging about a news story that declared him “the No. 1 guy standing between the American people and immigration reform” did nothing to placate or persuade those who were out to defeat him.
Republicans who simply want to keep tacking right to maintain their power should also note that if the Tea Party helped mobilize support for them in 2010, it now threatens to reduce the party to a right-wing sect.
The movement is very good at organizing its own, but it is doing little to attract new voters the GOP’s way. If anything, the party’s rightward drift is pushing people out. In December 2010, 33 percent of Americans told Gallup’s pollsters they considered themselves Republicans. Last month only 24 percent did. Although the turnout was up in the Brat-Cantor race, participation has been low in most of this year’s Republican primaries.
Appeasing the Tea Party could create a vicious cycle: the more the party is defined by a hard core, the easier it will be for the most conservative voters to dominate it in primaries involving only the most ardent.
Cantor actually showed signs of understanding this. He gave speeches, including his “Making Life Work” address in February 2013, that at least acknowledged the need to address the practical worries of Americans who are not particularly ideological and don’t wave “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.
Politicians, he said, needed to respond to citizens’ “real-life concerns.” These included such basics as “where can you find an affordable home in a good neighborhood to raise your kids?” and “which health care plan can I afford?” and “will the children make it through high school and get into a college of their choice, and if so, can you afford it?”
Yet Cantor may have been most comfortable on safe conservative ground. He tried to start a practical policy conversation but did not take bold next steps to modify the direction the party took in 2010.
What the Tea Party giveth, the Tea Party taketh away. Its energy in 2010 was directed against President Obama and helped Cantor become House majority leader. Now its sights are set on purifying and purging the Republican Party. But purges, as Cantor has learned, are painful. They can also be dangerous to a party’s long-term well-being.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 11, 2014
“GOP Civil War?”: More Like Petty Wrangling Over Infinitesimal Ideological ‘Distinctions’
Mississippi primary voters just could not decide whether they wanted to nominate a very conservative Republican or a very conservative Republican for the US Senate.
Very nearly 50 percent of Tuesday’s primary voters favored a right-wing stalwart who opposes abortion rights and marriage equality, supports restrictive Voter ID laws, promises to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rips “Obamacare,” the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trashes “entitlement” programs.
Very nearly 50 percent of Tuesday’s primary voters favored another right-wing stalwart, who opposes abortion rights and marriage equality, supports restrictive Voter ID laws, promises to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rips “Obamacare,” the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trashes “entitlement” programs.
But Mississippi Republicans couldn’t quite get to a majority opinion about which conservative was conservative enough. So with virtually all the votes counted (and with a tiny percentage of the total streaming off to a little-known third candidate), the good Republicans of the Magnolia State appear to have decided to have another go at it—setting up a June 24 runoff that will require several more weeks of wrangling over what to most Americans will seem to be infinitesimal ideological “distinctions.”
That’s the thing to remember about the fabulous imagining that there is a meaningful difference between “establishment Republicans” and “Tea Party Republicans.”
Yes, there are stylistic distinctions to be noted between incumbent Senator Thad Cochran, a relatively distinguished senior senator, and state Senator Chris McDaniel, a relatively undistinguished challenger who says his campaign “had nothing to do with this sad incident” where a conservative blogger photographed the incumbent’s bedridden wife. Yes, the two Republicans now appear to be set for a high-profile runoff race that will be portrayed as a “GOP civil war” over emphasis and approach.
But that does not place them anywhere near the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
Cochran is identified as the “establishment” choice, which means he is favored by the US Chamber of Commerce and the CEOs and Wall Street financiers who support its campaign to elect a Senate that will rubber-stamp a wildly pro-corporate agenda.
McDaniel is identified as the “anti-establishment” Tea Party insurgent, which means that he is favored by the Club for Growth and the CEOs and Wall Street financiers interests who support its campaign to elect a Senate that will rubber-stamp a wildly pro-corporate agenda.
For the most part, this year’s supposedly significant Senate contests between the establishment and the “Tea Party” have explored the range of opinion from what would historically have been understood as the right wing of the Republican Party to what is now understood as the right wing of the Republican Party.
Some very wealthy people take these distinctions very seriously. They have money to burn, and they are burning it up this year on political purity tests that pit those who like their economic and social conservatism straight against those who want it with a twist of Ted Cruz.
This has already made for an expensive race in Mississippi. Roughly $8 million in outside spending has been lavished on the state’s television stations—in addition to big spending from the Club for Growth, Citizens United and the Tea Party Patriots for McDaniel and big spending from the Chamber and the National Association of Realtors for Cochran. The race has seen $1.1 million spent by “Senate Conservatives Action” for McDaniel and $1.7 million spent by the “Mississippi Conservatives” super PAC for Cochran.
Confused? Don’t be.
McDaniel is a conservative.
And so is Cochran.
Despite the theater-of-the-absurd campaign, it is even more absurd to suggest that Cochran is a liberal with a Southern accent. Mississippi is not in the habit of populating the Senate with progressives. The incumbent’s latest US Chamber of Commerce rating is 100 percent, while his National Education Association ranking is zero. Cochran’s latest ACLU rating is zero, while the American Security Council Foundation has got him at 100 percent. Cochran gets 100 percent from the National Rifle Association and he’s at zero with the American Association of University Women. His latest rating from the National Right-to-Life Committee is 100 percent, while NARAL Pro-Choice America has him at zero—as does the latest assessment from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
It is true that Cochran has, on rare occasions been a reasonable player. But those are pretty much the same rare occasions when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, another Tea Party target this year, has chosen not to follow Cruz off whatever deep end the Texan might be approaching. Usually, what passes for reasonableness is a vote to take care of some pressing home-state business—such as, in Cochran’s case, specific support for disaster assistance after hurricanes hit the Mississippi coast and general enthusiasm for military spending that keeps Mississippians employed.
That may make Cochran insufficiently “pure” for the purists.
But it is not a distinction that the vast majority of Americans need bother with, unless, of course, they really do imagine that Thad Cochran and Mitch McConnell are liberals.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, June 4, 2014
“The Winds Of No Change”: Defining Moments For The Tea Party Movement And The GOP
In his latest New York Times column, Ross Douthat notes the civil war over the “GOP civil war” narrative of this election cycle, and argues the real proof of the Tea Party pudding will be in the 2016 Republican presidential campaign:
[T]here are several politicians, all elected as insurgents and all potential presidential candidates in 2016, who still aspire to be the Tea Party’s version of Obama: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And because each embodies different facets of the Tea Party phenomenon, each would write a very different conclusion to its story.
A Rubio victory would probably make the Tea Party seem a little less ideological in hindsight, a little more Middle American and populist, and more like a course correction after George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” than a transformative event.
A Cruz triumph would lend itself to a more ideological reading of the Tea Party’s impact, but one that fit readily into existing categories: It would suggest that Tea Party-ism was essentially the old Reagan catechism in a tricorn hat, movement conservatism under a “don’t tread on me” banner.
A Paul victory would write a starkly libertarian conclusion to the Tea Party’s story, making it seem much more revolutionary — a true break with both Reaganism and Bushism, with an uncertain future waiting beyond.
I tend to agree with Douthat on his basic point: nothing quite defines a political party like its presidential nominees, which is why presidential nominating contests are important beyond their impact on general elections. But I still think he underestimates the extent to which the GOP has already internalized the Tea Party message, even as the Tea Folk are mostly conservative “base” activists who have been radicalized in recent years. Consider this line:
[T]he one thing about Republican politics that pretty clearly wasn’t “Tea Party” was the man the G.O.P. ultimately nominated in 2012.
Is that really true? Pretty early in the 2012 cycle, Romney embraced the single most important programmatic demand of the Tea Party Movement, the Republican Study Committee’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, which offered a permanent, constitutional limitation on the size and cost and therefore the functions of the federal government. And in the defining moment of the general election campaign, the 47% video, Romney embraced and articulated the resentment of “winners” against “losers” that was at the heart of the Tea Party Movement’s founding event, Rick Santelli’s Rant.
You can object that Mitt was just pandering, and didn’t really mean the things he said in those two instances, just as he really wasn’t the savage immigrant-basher he seemed to be when going after poor clueless Rick Perry–or for that matter, the Movement Conservative favorite he purported to be in 2008. But it really doesn’t matter, does it? He was pushed in that direction again and again by the prevailing winds in his party, and no matter who wins what 2014 primaries, or which flavor of tea is selling best at any given moment, the wind’s still blowing in that direction today.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 27, 2014
“GOP’s Post-Obama Problem”: Why They’re Lost Without Him — And With The Electorate He Helped Create
With the 2014 congressional primary season almost behind us, the conventional wisdom has hardened: The Republican establishment has vanquished its Tea Party tormentors. The progressive response to that narrative — that the establishment only “won” by capitulating to the Tea Party — is hardening, too. I want to challenge that a little.
When North Carolina State Sen. Thom Tillis won the GOP Senate nomination in early May, it seemed ridiculous to claim the Tea Party had been defeated, though he technically had a Tea Party rival: Tillis was as extreme as his opponent, supporting personhood legislation and tax cuts for the wealthy, opposing immigration reform and boasting that he’d personally stopped the state’s Medicaid expansion. I argued at the time that the story was not the Tea Party’s defeat, but its victory: the extent to which it had taken over the Republican establishment.
That didn’t seem true in the wake of Tuesday night’s election results, particularly in Kentucky. Credit where it’s due: Mitch McConnell crushed Matt Bevin. Sure, he did it by courting his Tea Party junior Sen. Rand Paul and by sliming and outspending Bevin. And sure, he won by a smaller margin than any incumbent GOP senator who’d faced a primary in the last 80 years.
But he won, even after making a deal with Harry Reid to reopen the government that was supposed to be his undoing. So did Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a Boehner ally with a Tea Party rival, while in Georgia, the three candidates tied to the Tea Party lost, to two more polished and mainstream conservatives, Rep. Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue, who face a July run-off. And looking ahead, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Kansas’s Pat Roberts and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander look likely to beat back Tea Party challengers. In 2010, when even conservative incumbents like Utah’s Bob Bennett and South Carolina’s Bob Inglis lost their seats in Congress, all of those races likely would have turned out differently.
Something’s changed, and liberals can’t ignore it. Democrats won’t be running against neophytes or crackpots likely to self-destruct before November. Yet the GOP establishment’s short-term wins mask a long-term nightmare: The party has no real plan for American politics once Barack Obama goes off to enjoy a long retirement, or for the electorate he’s helped create.
“Empty In The Middle”: Don’t Be Fooled, McConnell’s Victory In Kentucky Is Also A Tea Party Win
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s primary victory on Tuesday night in Kentucky will undoubtedly tempt many a pundit to write the Tea Party’s eulogy. But the Tea Party will achieve in electoral death what it could never achieve in life: lasting control of the GOP agenda.
McConnell won because he’s got a familiar name, a lot of money and the kind of political clout that makes up for occasional lapses from orthodoxy. That might not be enough next time – as a local Kentucky Republican leader told the National Journal last week, the state party is “still McConnell’s Republican Party, but it’s edging toward being Rand [Paul]’s Republican Party”. But, it was enough to keep it from being challenger Matt Bevin’s Republican party – especially after his unforced errors and willingness to prize ideological purity over more pragmatic concerns (like the $2bn in pork McConnell brought home for agreeing to end the government shutdown).
McConnell didn’t win because he became a Tea Party member – he’s so conservative, he didn’t have to. (A vote analysis casts him as one of the top 25 conservative members of the Senate, and Tea Party darling and intrastate rival Paul is at number 19.) Instead, McConnell’s win just shows how easily the GOP grows over its fringes.
What’s happening in the Republican party is the worst of both the Tea Party and more traditional “free-market” (but never really as free as advertised) economics: an aggressive “pro-business” agenda combined with radically retrogressive social policies.
You could even say at this point that the GOP isn’t a big tent or even a coalition – it’s a torus, an ever-expanding donut-shaped object that’s empty in the middle.
The hole is where principles used to be, because flexibility comes at the price of purity. McConnell successfully neutralized challenger Bevin by being unafraid to grovel: he not only took junior Senator Rand Paul’s endorsement and staff, for example, but he also put up with their eye-rolling (and nose-holding) in exchange for that support.
There’s a history to the GOP establishment simply absorbing insurgent movements and moving right. The GOP has co-opted individual leaders (like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater) and even entire voting blocs (fundamentalist Christians). Each of those assimilations marched the party rightward to the point that, according to political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, the party today is the most conservative it’s been in one hundred years.
When the Tea Party complains that the Republican party has become too moderate, it can’t be measuring against the party of the last century, much less the last administration. Yet the anti-establishment drumbeat that has echoed through the culture has created a situation in which a majority of GOP voters – 54% – think the party should move even further to the right.
Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker put this in more quantitative terms: since 1975, Senate Republicans have moved twice as far to the right as Democrats have to the left – and McConnell has been a part of the leading edge. A statistical analysis of his votes since he came to the senate in 1984 shows that he’s voted more conservatively every year since.
At each level of governance below the Senate, the conservative undertow grows stronger. The House Republican caucus has shifted to the right six times further than the Democrats have left. And when you get closer to home – state-level offices and local races – you can see policies rolling backwards years of progress, most notably in reproductive health, gay rights and, most alarmingly, voting rights.
The media has meanwhile abetted this fiction of Tea Party radicalism versus establishment centrism. It takes precious little for be labelled a “moderate conservative” these days (and to reap the benefits of having even one area of ideological overlap with the great majority of political reporters who map moderate in their own views). Therefore we get a “moderate Pete King” (despite his history of anti-Muslim speech and advocacy of a greater surveillance state) and the “moderate” Jeb Bush lauded as a pragmatic voice of reason in the GOP. (People seem to have forgotten the radicalism of Bush’s governorship, from his direct intervention on the Terri Schaivo case to a fiscal record with the Cato Institute seal of approval.)
This all may have happened with or without the Tea Party – it’s just as attributable to the disintegration of campaign finance laws as it is to a grassroots movement. But the Tea Party gave the GOP the illusion of resurgence that’s turned out to be something more like a sugar high.
This rightward drift of the movement would probably be more alarming to liberals if it wasn’t so objectively risky for GOP. Though a combination of socially libertarian policies and moderately conservative financial ones has the potential to attract young voters (and women and minorities), that’s not what’s apparently on the agenda.
Rand Paul, who is both beloved by the Tea Party and a magnet for libertarian youth, nonetheless still echoes the worst of the GOP’s talking points on race and gender. Polling after the 2012 elections showed that the GOP had failed to significantly improve its appeal to any demographic outside already partisan voters. And, as other polling – including internal Republican analysis – has shown, without demographic expansion, the GOP is doomed anyway.
McConnell’s win fits nicely into a narrative of declining Tea Party influence. Yet the reality is that the Tea Party has won, even if their candidate didn’t. And, in more ways than one, both the GOP and “the establishment” are losing more every time.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, May 21, 2014
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