“Radicalism For The Sake Of Radicalism”: Four Years Later, The Tea Party Has Learned Nothing
The Tea Party is no longer a brand-new movement in American politics. So, more than four years in, what do they appear to have learned? How about: nothing. And they seem to want it that way.
Certainly that appears to be the case with the Tea Party as an electoral force. Oh, Tea Partyers will remind you – they’ve won some. Ted Cruz in Texas, Mike Lee in Utah, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin – all True Conservatives in good standing (at least last I looked; these things can change rapidly), all solid winners in their election bids. It’s hardly the case that nominating a Tea Party candidate is guaranteed to turn a win into a loss.
But three election cycles in, it’s pretty clear that nominating a candidate favored by Tea Partyers over what they consider “establishment” candidates is a formula for risking Republican disaster. And that it’s not going to change any time soon.
So it was for Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle in 2010. So it was with Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock in 2012. And so it’s likely to be with the 2014 crop.
The thing is, four years is plenty of time to develop solid, seasoned candidates. Indeed, once upon a time Marco Rubio was one of those solid, seasoned candidates. Rubio was a successful Florida Republican who had risen rapidly to become speaker of the Florida House; he then adopted the emerging Tea Party and went on to easily win an open U.S. Senate seat. But Rubio’s Tea Party credentials were tarnished because he actually tried to legislate on immigration; while it’s much too early to declare his career in trouble and it wouldn’t be surprising if he still ran a solid race for the Republican presidential nomination, it’s also very easy to imagine him having to fend off a Tea Party primary of his own if he runs for reelection instead of the White House in 2016.
So what do Republicans have for 2014? Matt Bevin, taking on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, is a first-time candidate; should he win, Republicans would probably lose that seat. In Georgia, Paul Braun in particular is thought by many to be a particularly weak candidate, capable of losing that open seat to Democrat Michelle Nunn if he emerges as the nominee. In Louisiana, Republicans had settled on a solid candidate to challenge Mary Landrieu, but Tea Partyer Rob Maness has jumped in with plenty of serious organizational support.
Granted, this early in the cycle, none of these candidates has (to my knowledge, at least) managed to embarrass himself by orating on rape. Nor have any of them yet revealed themselves as certified non-witches. Indeed, it’s so early that I don’t even know if they have a history of having said crazy things – although I suspect that Mississippi Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a former talk radio host, has furnished enough for a fat opposition research file.
Still, it appears to be no more distinguished of a crop than the 2010 and 2012 versions, and I strongly suspect they will begin to generate equally baroque sound bites as soon as the public portion of the campaign season begins. After all, we just had birther Dean Young, who provided plenty of entertainment if you enjoy politicians saying crazy things, come close to knocking off mainstream conservative Bradley Byrne in the Alabama 1 special election.
There’s nothing about being conservative, even extremely conservative, that would necessarily generate bad candidates. But it’s a mistake to interpret Tea Partyism as simply about being more conservative than mainstream Republicans. Instead, in practice, it’s basically turned out to be a cross between radicalism for the sake of radicalism, along with an extreme suspicion of elites. Which in turn has made it rather easy for hucksters and scam artists to convince Tea Party voters and activists that solid conservatives are really squishes and RINOs. There are no issue positions one can cling to that will prevent those charges; accusations of being insufficiently “conservative” in this atmosphere, to these voters, are impossible to refute.
Indeed, as we’ve seen with Ted Cruz, the very reaction to crazy things that Tea Party politicians say really is the best proof that they are actually True Conservatives.
Which doesn’t mean that Democrats are about to win a Senate seat in Mississippi (although they would be smart to at least get a plausible candidate on the ballot, just in case). But it does mean that we can expect more of the same from Tea Party candidates – perhaps even worse, since by this cycle, perhaps, raving against rape will be too old hat to get condemned by Rachel Maddow, and therefore not sufficient to establish one’s True Conservative credentials.
And therefore, expect Republicans to continue to give away elections they could have won – and to prove incapable of governing in many cases when they do win. The dysfunctional Republican Party isn’t getting better any time soon.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Nation, November 9, 2013
“The Monster They Created”: Can Corporate America Break The Republican Radical Right?
Back in the early 1970s, corporate America got together and developed a plan of action to combat the takeover of America by what they saw as an unremittingly radical left. If we don’t act and get politically engaged, these corporate titans said, this country is going down the chute.
Forty years later, corporate America beholds the monster it created. And now, these same institutions need to step up and rein in an unremittingly radical right. Only they can stop this nonsense, and it will take an effort as concerted and well-organized as the one they undertook in the 70s.
Here’s what happened then. In the 1960s and early 70s, a good chunk of America’s corporate elite really did feel that the free-enterprise system was under threat. In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer in Richmond who would soon be nominated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, to tell them how to save America. The result was the famous Powell memo, which urged the Chamber to start fighting back to protect the system before it was too late in the following arenas: on college campuses; in the media; in the courts; at stockholder and shareholder meetings; and in the political realm.
There’s been a lot of interesting debate over the years about how important the Powell memo really was. But whatever centrality one accords it, the fact is that it was right around then that conservatism really started to organize itself politically. The major think tanks got off the ground (Heritage in 1973), or, in other cases like the American Enterprise Institute, were transformed into something much more overtly political. Several media-monitoring outfits were started (Google the name Reed Irvine, if you weren’t around in those days). Groups were created to train young conservatives and fund right-wing campus newspapers. By 1980, they helped elect a president, feed him appointees and judicial nominees (the Federalist Society started in 1982), and create much of his policy agenda. Today, this organized right-wing infrastructure spends more than $300 million a year on politics.
But now, as we’re seeing, the corporatists’ biggest problem isn’t the left. It’s the right—the nativist and ideological right that no longer wants to listen to them. It was encouraging last week to see officials from the Chamber, the National Retail Federation, and other organizations vent their frustrations to the New York Times and vow that they are going to get involved in Republican primaries to try to defeat some crazies.
And it’s great to hear Tom Donohue, the head of the chamber, say things like these remarks, which he recently made on C-SPAN: “You’ve got to go into the primaries not just to affect this race or that but to send a message on who we are and what we believe. We want to get a better result for the American people and get people there who give the arguments a fair shake.” His ultimate goal, said Donohue, is a “more governable Republican Party.”
Hallelujah to that. But the Chamber and the others are going to have to put lots of money behind this. And they’re going to have to dig in for lengthy trench warfare. Can they reach, and energize, the half of the GOP electorate that isn’t driven by resentment? The half that’s conservative, which is fine, but not boiling over with rage? The half that would accept and embrace an immigration-reform bill and investments in infrastructure, as the Chamber does, even though Barack Obama wants them, too?
This is the biggest political issue of our time. Others are close—the corrupt hold of money on our system is admittedly a pretty close second. But this is the biggest one, because a reasonable GOP would make the country governable again. A critical mass of conservative compromisers, with maybe a few genuinely moderate Republicans thrown in, would end this dysfunction more quickly than anything else.
And the only way for that to happen is for Republican officeholders to fear that segment of the GOP electorate more than they fear the radical segment. That’s going to take a long time and lot of money and organization. But we do know from polls that those Republican voters exist. They’re just intimidated right now.
But to lead this fight, the Chamber needs to see it in just the historical terms I’ve laid out. It’s 1971 all over again. Who is the Lewis Powell who will save corporate America from the rage machine it helped create?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 14, 2013
“Obama’s Too Mean”: Filled With Contempt, Tea Party Republicans Look For Excuse To Rationalize Their Disgust
Tea Party Republicans are not known for their timidity. We are, after all, talking about a group of right-wing activists and lawmakers who push an agenda that’s as aggressive as it is regressive, reject compromise, and demand brutal policy consequences for everyone who stands in their way.
It is therefore rather amusing to hear about President Obama being a big meanie.
When tea-party Republicans arrived in Congress in 2011, many were energized and ready to shake up Washington — whatever the cost. But now, some are claiming that it is President Obama who is playing too rough.
Amid the government shutdown and debt-ceiling standoff — which has raised rhetoric sharply — they say the president has demonized what they consider healthy political opposition.
“The difference is, I don’t think his predecessors have antagonized the other side,” says Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., who was president of the tea-party-packed House Republican freshman class last session.
The sentiment was echoed by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who said Obama’s willingness to antagonize Republicans is “not good for the country.”
Wilson is perhaps best known for heckling the president during a speech to a joint session of Congress. He’s the guy complaining about Obama antagonizing him.
I’ll confess that I often find these lawmakers’ perspective inexplicable, but this strikes me as unusually bizarre, even for them.
Love him or hate him, Obama’s outreach to his rivals has no contemporary parallel. This Democratic president has brought Republicans into his cabinet and administration; he’s incorporated Republican ideas into his agenda; and he’s tried schmoozing Republicans outside of their official duties. He’s adopted policy measures his Democratic base hates, but which he’ll nevertheless tolerate in the hopes of bipartisan cooperation. He’s tried meeting Republicans more than half-way on everything from health care to immigration, deficit reduction to energy.
I can think of a variety of adjectives to describe this, but “antagonistic” isn’t one of them.
So what’s driving this?
The current complaint seems to be about the ongoing crises on Capitol Hill, but even here, the president is hardly playing hardball. He embraced Republican spending levels and called for a spending bill with no far-right riders. If the right feels “antagonized” by this, maybe the problem is with them, not the Democratic president who already gave them what they asked for in the budget fight.
Besides, we are talking about a group of lawmakers who’ve not only shut down the government, but who’ve threatened to crash the global economy on purpose unless Obama meets their demands. Do we really need to have a conversation about “healthy political opposition”?
In the larger context, though, what I think we’re seeing is something nearly as insidious. Republicans, filled with contempt for the president, are looking for an excuse to rationalize their disgust, so they’ve come up with … this. He’s hurting their feelings.
In other words, it’s Obama’s fault Republicans hate him because he made them hate him.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, October 10, 2013
“America Held Hostage”: The Age Of Right Wing Republican “Government By Class” Politcal Thuggery
Welcome to America Held Hostage.
The reference is not just to the ongoing government shutdown that theoretically could be — but in all likelihood won’t be — over by the time you read this. Rather, it is also to the intransigence and extremism of the Republican Party, a brand of government-by-crisis political thuggery that made this confrontation inevitable.
And not just the Republican Party but more specifically, that collection of cranks and outliers within the party so addled by hatred of the president, so crippled by the mental disorder known as Obama Dementia, that they are incapable of rationality and reason. They are the right wing of the right wing, a walking id so fully divorced from reality that even many of their fellow conservatives are wary — and weary — of them. And these are the people who are running the show.
God bless us, every one.
This latest in a series of manufactured crises centers on the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s landmark health care reform. It may be a good law, may be a bad law, may be (and probably is) a good law with some flaws, but one thing is certain: it is a law. Duly passed by Congress, duly signed by a duly elected president, it has survived no less than 41 votes by congressional Republicans to weaken or repeal it — not to mention a showdown in the Supreme Court. No law in modern memory has been more thoroughly or energetically challenged.
Having failed epically and repeatedly to kill it, these right-wing Ahabs now embark upon an extortionate new tack that, even for them, is astonishing in its disingenuous gall. They have blocked passage of a routine resolution to fund the government unless the health care act is defunded. Then they condemn the president because he won’t “negotiate” with them.
It’s as if a Little League team lost a big game on a critical call. They complain to the umps, they look at the instant replay, they file an appeal with the league, but the call still stands. So they take the ball and go home and say they will not play again until the other team agrees to “negotiate.”
What a crock. In that scenario as in this one, there is nothing to talk about. The problem isn’t the fairness of the process, but the inability of losers to accept the loss.
Once upon a time, a parent might have addressed the problem of children behaving like brats through the vigorous application of leather to the region of the gluteus maximus. Once upon a time, a voter might have addressed the problem of politicians behaving like brats in much the same way.
But the ability to spank legislators is largely lost. The reason in a word: gerrymandering — voting district lines drawn to insulate legislators from voters with contrary viewpoints. Lawmakers choose their own voters, are answerable only to those true believers who already agree with them. It is a system guaranteed to reward extremism and make punishing it nearly impossible.
When you cannot “throw the bums out” (congressional incumbents are re-elected at a dictatorship rate: 90 percent), the bums are free to be as splenetic as they want to be. There is no pressure to be a statesman. Indeed, statesmanship becomes a liability.
The system must be fixed. Districts should be drawn by judges or other nonpartisan entities along sensible geographic and demographic lines. No more of these crazy-shaped districts that look like Plastic Man eating spaghetti on a rollercoaster.
The stakes could hardly be higher. The full faith and credit of the United States is at risk. Yet the right wing of the right wing engages in petulance, pettiness and pique that would embarrass a 4-year-old. They will have things their way — or they will shoot the hostage.
These people seem not to understand that elections have consequences. Unfortunately for this country, obstructionism does, too.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Featured Post, The National Memo, October 9, 2013
“An Extreme Miscalculation”: Government Shutdown, The Tea Party’s Last Stand
If the nation is lucky, this October will mark the beginning of the end of the tea party.
The movement is suffering from extreme miscalculation and a foolish misreading of its opponents’ intentions. This, in turn, has created a moment of enlightenment, an opening to see things that were once missed.
Many Republicans, of course, saw the disaster coming in advance of the shutdown. But they were terrified to take on a movement that is fortified by money, energy and the backing of a bloviating brigade of talk-show hosts. The assumption was that the tea party had become invincible inside the GOP.
People who knew better followed Sen. Ted Cruz down a path of confrontation over Obamacare. Yet even before the shutdown began, Republicans stopped talking about an outright repeal of Obamacare, as House Speaker John Boehner’s ever-changing demands demonstrated.
The extent of the rout was then underscored in the hot-microphone incident last week when Sen. Rand Paul was caught plotting strategy with Sen. Mitch McConnell. Paul’s words, spoken after he had finished a television interview, said more than he realized.
“I just did CNN. I just go over and over again: ‘We’re willing to compromise, we’re willing to negotiate,’ ” Paul said, adding this about the Democrats: “I don’t think they’ve poll-tested, ‘We won’t negotiate.’ ”
Tellingly, Paul described the new GOP line this way: “We wanted to defund it, we fought for that, but now we’re willing to compromise on this.”
It’s revealing to hear a politician who is supposed to be all about principle mocking Democrats for failing to do enough poll-testing. It makes you wonder whether Paul poll-tests everything he says. But Paul’s statement raised a more important question: If just days after it began, a shutdown that was about repealing Obamacare is not about repealing Obamacare, then what is it about?
Actually, it’s what even conservatives are calling the Seinfeld Shutdown: It’s about absolutely nothing, at least where substance is concerned. Moreover, Paul and his friends need to explain why, if they are so devoted to “negotiation,” they didn’t negotiate long ago. Why did they relentlessly block negotiations over a Senate Democratic budget whose passage, according to a now-discarded pile of press releases, they once made a condition for discussions?
Only now can we fully grasp that politics on the right has been driven less by issues than by a series of gestures. And they give up on even these as soon as their foes try to take what they say seriously.
What the tea party and Boehner did not reckon with is that Obama and the Democrats are done being intimidated by the use of extra-constitutional means to extort concessions that the right cannot win through normal legislative and electoral methods.
Obama doesn’t just want to get past this crisis. He wants to win. And win he must, because victory is essential to re-establishing constitutional governance, a phrase that the tea party ought to understand.
Obama didn’t need to “poll-test” his position because the poll that matters, the 2012 election, showed that the tea party hit its peak long ago, in the summer of 2011, when it seemed to have the president on the defensive.
The slowly building revolt among Republicans against the tea party shutdown is one sign of how quickly the hard-right’s influence is fading. So is the very language they are being required to speak. Having talked incessantly about how useless and destructive government can be, House Republicans are now testifying to their reverence for what government does for veterans, health research, sick children and lovers of national parks, especially war memorials.
Appreciation for government rises when it’s no longer there. By pushing their ideology to its obvious conclusion, members of the Cruz-Paul right forced everyone else to race the other way.
Yes, the tea party will still have its Washington-based groups that raise money by bashing Washington, ginning up the faithful and threatening the less ideologically pure with primary challenges. But no Republican and no attentive citizen of any stripe will forget the mess these right-wing geniuses have left in their wake.
We now know that the tea party is primarily about postures aimed at undercutting sensible governance and premised on the delusion that Obama’s election victories were meaningless. Its leaders abandon these postures as soon as their adversaries stand strong and the poll-testers report their approach is failing. This will give pause to anyone ever again tempted to follow them into a cul-de-sac.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 6, 2013
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