- In the private sector people would be in jail for what they did.
- that all the new recruits from Nov. 2010 were going to cost the GOP the 2012 White House.
- Instead of looking at why the GOP almost became extinct, the Times focuses on the recent so-called debt ceiling debate.
- as MoveOn.org was in changing the democrat party.
- ------------------------
"It wasn’t that long ago that Republican moneymen and operatives in Washington were moping around K Street like Eeyore in the Hundred Acre Wood, lamenting their party’s extremist image and casting about for a candidate with a chance of beating Barack Obama in 2012. Citing what he called the “near self-immolation” of House Republicans during the debt-ceiling fiasco, Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, worried in early August that a “large number of Republican primary voters, and even more independent general-election voters, will be wary of supporting a Republican candidate in 2012 if the party looks as if it’s in the grip of an infantile form of conservatism.”"...
- Being a murderous neo-con is better? Stealing $6 billion a month from US taxpayers every month for 10 years in a fake war in Afghanistan to enrich pedophiles, defense contractors, rapists, thugs, and warlords in an openly acknowledged mafia like system--that's not 'infantile'?
- if not quite smug,
- effectively disarming the Tea Party mutiny.
If that’s the case, then it now seems like only a matter of time before the Republican empire, overwhelmed by insurrection for much of the last two years,
- strikes back at last.
“I think it’s waning now,” Scott Reed, a veteran strategist and lobbyist, told me when we talked about the Tea Party’s influence last month. Efforts to gin up primaries next year against two sitting senators — Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Indiana’s Dick Lugar — have been slow to gain momentum, Reed said, and it’s notable that more than half of the 50-plus members of the Tea Party caucus in the House ultimately fell in line and voted with Speaker John Boehner on his debt-ceiling compromise.
- Party leaders have managed to bleed some of the anti-establishment intensity out of the movement, Reed said,
by slyly embracing Tea Party sympathizers in Congress, rather than treating them as “those people.”
Did he mean to say that the party was slowly co-opting the Tea Partiers?
“Trying to,” Reed said. “And that’s the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing
- that you’re trying to control them.”
As I made the rounds of Republican Washington in recent weeks and reflected on all this newfound optimism, though, I found myself recalling what Ken Mehlman, who managed George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, liked to say back then: “Hope is not a strategy.” It’s not clear which of those two things — hope or strategy — the Republican establishment is really embracing.
After all, in September, not long after I saw Reed, far-right Republicans staged another successful mutiny in the House, temporarily blocking a spending bill that Boehner had championed. Meanwhile, the “supercommittee” of lawmakers created by the debt-ceiling legislation is supposed to find more budget cuts by the end of the year, which means Washington faces another very public showdown. The deficit debate in Congress could easily dominate the campaign season, complicating the party’s election-year message and making it hard for any nominee to unify pragmatic insiders and Tea Party outsiders.
“What happens on this debt and deficit issue could split us,” Don Fierce told me when we met in his downtown Washington office. “This thing is volatile.” Fierce is a party strategist who worked in the Ford administration and for Lee Atwater"...
- A lobbyist involved this long is part of the problem and should retire from public life. ed.
(continuing, NY Times): "...during the Reagan years and then founded a lobbying firm whose clients include Apple and the Ford Motor Company. He was clearly worried that some of his oldest friends in Washington were failing to grasp the peril of the moment.
- “We have not disarmed the bomb,” he said.
“Boehner reminds me of the lead in ‘The Hurt Locker.’ Pull the wrong wire, and this whole thing could blow up. For our people to say, ‘Gee whiz, so far, so good, no problem — ’ ” Fierce shook his head emphatically. “Just wait,” he said.
You can’t talk about the Republican establishment without trying to define what that really means, and this is something on which there is little consensus. Last month, I sat with Fred Malek in the Washington office of his private-equity firm."...
- Translation: Malek is a hedge fund guy. ed.
(continuing, NY Times): Malek, now 74, was in charge of fund-raising for his friend John McCain in 2008 and does the same job for the Republican Governors Association. He’s the founder of the American Action Network, a two-year-old group whose goal is to make the party’s economic agenda palatable to mainstream Republicans and independents. Malek belongs to the Alfalfa Club, whose 200 or so members, the old-line political and business aristocracy in both parties, expect the president to attend their annual dinner, and he occasionally gives exclusive parties at his home overlooking the Potomac River in McLean, Va. — including one in 2009 that brought together Sarah Palin and the party’s Washington elite."...
- Fine. Thanks. Now move on. ed.
(continuing, NY Times): "“You think I’m an establishment Republican?” Malek asked me.
When I said that I did, he let forth a lyrical string of expletives that, sadly, are not printable here. “My dad drove a beer truck delivering beer to taverns in Cicero and Chicago, Ill.,” he said. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college. No, I don’t consider myself part of the establishment.”
I then followed his gaze to the photos on his wall: Malek in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon, Malek with Ronald Reagan, Malek with George H. W. Bush after the two jumped from a plane on the former president’s 80th birthday.
“I’m looking for pictures on my wall to prove I’m not establishment,” Malek said.
I suggested he might need to find another wall, and Malek laughed in surrender.
George Will recently said there is no such thing as the Republican establishment, which is a little like Michael Douglas saying there’s no such thing as Hollywood. But Will’s point, shared by a lot of other longtime Republicans I spoke with, is that the real establishment, the league of Protestant lawyers and bankers from the Northeast and Midwest who once exercised enormous influence, was smashed in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, acting as the advance guard for a new breed of ideological conservatives from the West and South, wrested the nomination from Nelson Rockefeller. (Among Goldwater’s most vocal G.O.P. opponents at that time was a liberal Midwestern governor named George Romney.) Since then, this argument goes, the idea of any singular- establishment has been little more than a convenient media conceit.
It’s a fair point, but it may be just as accurate to say that the establishment has simply evolved over the years to accommodate more regional and cultural diversity, making it less monolithic but still ideologically cohesive. The pragmatic “white shoe” lawyers of the Nixon-Rockefeller era were largely stamped out over the ensuing decades by more conservative Reaganites from the West Coast and Bush backers from Texas, by movement conservatives whose constituents included evangelicals and libertarians and neoconservative defense hawks. They don’t all belong to the same country clubs, but they have retained a remarkable ability to mobilize around a series of candidates and legislative objectives."...
- They rolled out Henry Kissinger a few weeks ago to try and get a Bush establishment GOP candidate, Christie, to run. They can call it what they want, the bottom line is they're about protecting themselves, not this country. ed.
(continuing, NY Times): "Today’s establishment is really a consortium of separate and overlapping establishments: a governing establishment of those who have served in administrations or in Congress; a political establishment of campaign consultants; a media establishment dominated by Fox News or the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and a policy establishment at organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
If there is any one power center that connects all of these, though, it’s what you could call the money establishment — the group of senior Republicans, many of whom came to Washington as ideological warriors in the 1980s or early ’90s, who now make their living principally through the business of government. They wield quiet power as corporate lobbyists or regulatory consultants or prolific fund-raisers, or often as all of these at once. Consider the machinations that transpired last year after Joe Miller, a Tea Party insurgent in Alaska, beat the sitting senator, Lisa Murkowski, in a primary. Murkowski’s decision to then run in the general election (which she ultimately won) as a write-in candidate put the establishment in the uncomfortable position of having to abandon either the winner of a legitimate primary or a popular incumbent. “That debate was held internally, discussed, and everyone came to an understanding,” Fierce told me. “We would support whoever won the primaries. No ifs and buts. The alternative would have been disastrous.”
Among establishment figures, Fierce is probably one of the most sympathetic to the Tea Party cause, and yet it’s the very existence of such back-room decisions that so ignites the contempt of the Tea Party activists. The way they see it, too many movement conservatives, who in their day espoused fiscal restraint and limited government, have now become stewards of the Washington shop, working alongside Democrats to keep the federal money flowing so that they and their friends in corporate boardrooms can build second homes and write tuition checks to private schools. Tea Party members call such figures “big-government conservatives” — a category that includes the former president George W. Bush and most of the party’s Congressional leadership. Or they use an epithet that was popular with an earlier generation of conservative activists: RINO, or Republican in Name Only.
You can imagine how this irritates longtime Republicans in Washington. “The thing I get a kick out of is these Tea Party folks calling me a RINO,” John Feehery, a lobbyist who was once a senior House aide, recently told me. “No, guys, I’ve been a Republican all along. You go off into
- your own little world and then come back and say it’s your party.
- This ain’t your party.”
Feehery said that Republicans had yet to sort out their “Ron Paul problem,” by which he meant the proliferation of a kind of conspiratorial, anti-Washington rhetoric. “There’s that element of paranoia,” Feehery said. “Establishment Republicans look at these guys and say, ‘You’re nuts.’ ”
It’s worth pointing out that when Republicans express concern about the anti-government militancy in their midst, it has a ring of serious denial. After all, generations of Republican candidates have now echoed the theme of Ronald Reagan in his 1981 inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” And a progression of ideological uprisings inside the party — the Reagan revolutionaries, Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork brigades, Newt Gingrich’s band of guerrilla lawmakers and now the Tea Partiers — have only pushed the anti-Washington argument closer to its illogical extreme. Thus could a smiling Michele Bachmann stand on a debate stage last month and declare that no one should pay the federal government a penny of taxes, for anything — a statement that didn’t even draw a follow-up question from the panel of Fox News journalists arrayed before her.
Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicare prescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk to them now, these same Republicans seem positively baffled that anyone could have actually internalized, so literally, all the scorching resentment for government
- that has come to define the modern conservative campaign.
Vin Weber was 28 when he was elected to Congress in the Reagan wave of 1980, and he soon became one of Newt Gingrich’s chief allies — part of a group of rebellious young conservatives who rose up against their affable minority leader, Bob Michel. Weber left Congress before the 1994 Republican takeover, forced out by the House banking scandal, but soon reinvented himself as one of the more powerful lobbyists in town. When I sat with Weber on a late-summer day in his corner office across the street from the National Portrait Gallery, I suggested that he had been, in effect, the Bachmann of his day. He laughed out loud. “Yeah, probably so,” he said.
Like nearly every other establishment Republican I visited, Weber went out of his way to tell me how much he admired these Tea Party lawmakers and shared in their essential cause. “One thing I do notice about them,” he added, “is that when I ask them, ‘So how are you enjoying it?’ almost none of them will say, ‘Oh, jeez, I’m really loving this.’ They all say some version of, ‘This is not what I’d want to be doing,
Weber seemed genuinely surprised that this aversion to Washington didn’t melt away once they arrived in town.
“I can just tell you, when I came to Congress, we were rabble-rousers, but, boy, if you’d asked any of us six months into it how we were enjoying it, we’d have said this was the greatest opportunity of a lifetime,” Weber said. “It just struck me. And it’s part and parcel of this anti-government mind-set.”
I wondered if maybe the Tea Partiers’ contempt for Washington was just a kind of outsider’s shtick.
“I’d feel better about it if I thought it was,” Weber said glumly.
He had on his mind the infamous 1990 tax increase that the first President Bush negotiated with Democrats and signed into law, despite having made his “read my lips” pledge against doing exactly that. Weber was among those who adamantly opposed the deal, in much the same way that today’s Tea Partiers resist any compromise on spending.
“I’ve thought about that a lot since then and how it might have been handled differently,” Weber said, sounding a little pained at the memory. “I don’t regret what we did, although it’s hard to see how much good came out of it. We ended up with a tax deal that moved to the left, after we defeated it in the House the first time, and may have contributed to the defeat of the president.”
There was a lesson in all this for the Tea Partiers, Weber said — one he had been trying to impart to them whenever he got the chance. “I think I know what they want to accomplish, and I agree with most of it,” he said. “But if they want to accomplish it, they need to ‘rise to the level of politics.’ I mean, you can’t just stand there and take a stand and say, ‘I’m not going to compromise on my position.’ Because you won’t achieve anything.”
This issue of compromise versus absolutism came up in most of the conversations I had with longstanding Washington Republicans, because it gets to the essential quandary they face in trying to exploit a popular movement for their own policy ends. Most establishment Republicans, including those who would be derided by the Tea Partiers as big-government conservatives, were disheartened by the rate of spending during the Bush years. This is especially true for the economic conservatives who sit on the boards of policy and advocacy groups and who stood by, quietly seething, while Dick Cheney declared that deficits no longer mattered. Their No. 1 policy goal is to change the trajectory of spending on entitlement programs, namely Medicare and Social Security, before public debt becomes an all-out crisis. And many of the Republicans I talked to confided that they would be willing to accept some higher taxes on corporations, or even on millionaires, in exchange for a deal to meaningfully roll back entitlement spending — something Obama and Boehner briefly explored during the debt-ceiling negotiations.
For these Republicans, the rise of the Tea Party has been a great turn of fortune, because the movement suddenly exerted more public pressure to cut spending than anyone would have thought possible just two years ago. But the same Tea Party members who created this more conducive climate are also opposed to even a hint of compromise on taxes. (The Boehner-Obama talks failed after lawmakers on both sides rebelled, but the biggest roadblock was the opposition of strident House Republicans who were threatening to take the American economy over a cliff if they didn’t get their way.)"...
- "Over a cliff?" 8 years of the Bush crowd sent us over a cliff. Then Obama tied the middle class to a boulder and sank it in the ocean. With comfortable to massive majorities in congress, he failed to submit one budget for 2 years. The Times doesn't think that was pushing the American people off a cliff? We've given Obama fabulous wealth and fame. And he views us with such contempt that he doesn't even submit a budget while throwing US tax money out the door as fast as he can in bailouts, start-up ventures, foreign grants, and new wars every day? ed.
(continuing, NY Times): "And while the Tea Partiers like to talk about trimming programs like Medicaid, they’ve not put much of their energy behind the kind of radical restructuring that Paul Ryan, the Republican congressman, has proposed."...
- Ryan is an establishment guy they put in the spotlight with his "plan" to drown out the Nov. 2010 people. Nov. 2010 in large part was about defunding and unraveling ObamaCare, which passed on a fluke because George Bush was so terrible no Republicans were left in House at the time. The GOP wanted no anti-ObamaCare talk, the recent removal of the CLASS portion of it notwithstanding. These are people who like Fred Upton and his Al Gore light bulbs. ed.
(continuing, NY Times): "Instead, the loudest members of the Tea Party caucus tend to dwell almost exclusively on cuts to discretionary domestic spending, which accounts for less than a fifth of the federal budget. Not only does this do little to change the long-term fiscal outlook, but it also puts the caucus in direct conflict with establishment Republicans like Vin Weber, who are inclined to protect some of those discretionary programs — either because they actually believe the programs have merit
- or because some company is paying them to preserve the status quo.
“I believe in foreign aid,” Weber told me. “I believe it’s important to America.” He said he opposed the steep, 10-year cuts to defense and discretionary spending — including programs in biomedical research — that Republican newcomers backed. “If you actually did that, you would do tremendous damage to the important things government does in this country,” Weber said. “And I think the government does do important things in the country.”"...
- No one is saying it doesn't. A lobbyist is a salesman. He's going to say what a salesman says. ed
- “They’ll become the establishment,”
Still, absorption into the establishment, even if possible, takes time to unfold, and Washington Republicans are focused only on the year ahead, preferring to see this disorderly period as little more than an interlude. For the past year or so, voters have viewed Republican politics almost exclusively through the lens of Capitol Hill, and they haven’t loved what they’ve seen. In polling by the Pew Research Center, negative views of the Tea Party jumped 11 points between January and August, and Congress as a whole has seen its approval ratings fall to as low as 12 percent in recent months. (It makes you wonder: who exactly is this 12 percent who say Congress is doing a fine job?)."...
- If the media is lying, hiding the truth, creating hysteria 24/7 about the Tea Party, and the President of the United States even says the Tea Party 'racist,' what else would "polls" say? Then they use "polls" as "news" to prove their personal view. ed.
For most of the last century, Republicans were an almost exclusively executive party. While Democrats controlled Congress, with only minor interruptions,
- for more than 40 years until 1994,
Republicans focused their energies on gaining power through the presidency, which they held for about two-thirds of the time between the elections of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and Barack Obama in 2008. Perhaps that explains why the Republican establishment has proven so remarkably adept at mobilizing behind tested candidates, men who have proved themselves as campaigners and fund-raisers, and shepherding them through an increasingly perilous primary process.
In the last 10 presidential elections, the party has chosen only two nominees who hadn’t run previously; one, George W. Bush, was the son of a president, and the other, Gerald Ford, was already holding the office. (In contrast, Democrats during that same period nominated seven candidates who were running for the first time.) The establishment’s preferred nominee rarely makes it to the convention without a serious primary challenge,
- but not since Barry Goldwater shocked the party in 1964 has that candidate failed to make it there at all.
In other words, while some strange things can happen when the Republican faithful get restless in the off years, the presidential process is the means by which the party establishment
- has traditionally reasserted control.
- The NY Times keeps news to itself. This isn't something new. What do you think enabled George Soros to spend $27 million trying to defeat George Bush in 2004? 527 groups.ed.
Rove was publicly critical last year of some of the more controversial Senate candidates and their effect on the party’s image, particularly Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell. And American Crossroads serves as a kind of fire wall for the party establishment — a way to project, through massive television buys in every critical market, a message aimed at independent voters, while reducing to static the more extremist rhetoric that might emanate from local Tea Parties or their heroes back in Washington.
You could say, then, that everything is in place for the establishment to get a grip on the party and the White House once again — except, of course, for the small detail of having an actual candidate. For the first time in what feels like forever (though it’s more like 1968), Republicans are going into this election without a consensus choice or a guy who had clearly earned his shot. (In the desire of some prognosticators to cast Mitt Romney as the proverbial next-guy-in-line, it’s often overlooked that Mike Huckabee actually earned more delegates in 2008.) Even as Romney and Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman came pleading for their support earlier this year, the party’s traditional fund-raisers and Washington validators resisted making commitments, hoping to enlist a candidate they knew and trusted. The establishment’s preferred candidate, generally speaking, was Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s second-term governor, who served as a political aide in the Reagan administration and as budget director for George W. Bush. Probably more than any elected official in America today, Daniels makes an argument about the moment that precisely reflects the thinking of most establishment Republicans. He did so, most memorably, in a rather unlikely forum — at the annual gathering of far-right activists known as the Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Washington this past February. Daniels devoted much of his keynote speech to the establishment case for reducing federal debt and remaking entitlement programs, which he calls a generational challenge, rather than trimming government on the margins through discretionary spending. But he also made a forceful case for the willingness to compromise and for broadening the party’s appeal beyond the most conservative voters. He didn’t say overtly that he was open to new taxes, but he told the audience of activists that Republicans simply couldn’t succeed in solving the nation’s intractable problems without giving something up in the process.
“Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers,” Daniels said, a comment that must have jarred some of his listeners. “I for one have no interest in standing in the wreckage of our republic saying, ‘I told you so’ or ‘You should have done it my way.’ ” And he warned, “We should distinguish carefully skepticism about big government from contempt for all government.”"...
- It has nothing to do with "purity," that's just a word the GOP and the media use to make us look like wackos and divert attention from the real problem. We need a few federal agencies shuttered, we need to undo hundreds of regulations. Government in many other countries is completely "corrupt," a euphemism for "criminal." It has happened here too.
(continuing, NY Times): "When I met Daniels last month in his cavernous Statehouse office, he cautioned that the Tea Party movement, like all effective popular movements, had an effect far beyond the proportion of its actual numbers. “I wouldn’t minimize for a minute their importance,” he said, “but I wouldn’t fixate too much on the Tea Party. There’s a whole lot more to the Republican Party than the Tea Party.”
This was essentially his message for the party’s presidential candidates too, none of whom he has thus far endorsed. “It would be dumb to try to walk away from our most passionate — and I never use words like this — base,” Daniels told me. “But I think it’s fair to say that the most impressive achievements in political leadership are those who lead a party or a movement to a different place, who create some change in their own party so that it can achieve greater things. Reagan changed the Republican Party in an additive way. Bill Clinton changed the Democratic Party in an additive way. Tony Blair is the best example I can think of.”
To hear Daniels talk about the party’s challenge was to get some clarity on why establishment Republicans have been so dissatisfied with the candidates they actually have. What they want is what you might call a “channeler” — someone, like a Reagan or a Clinton, who won’t simply give voice to populist fury but who might channel it in a way that makes it palatable to a wider swath of voters, someone who can take the call for austerity in Washington and make it sound more like a high-minded reform movement (in the tradition of a Robert La Follette or even a Ross Perot) than like something you would expect to hear at a survivalists’ convention. They’re looking for a candidate who has the requisite charisma and the towering conservative credentials to persuade these new activists that the party has to be — and sound — pragmatic.In some quarters, the search for that channeler may go on until every major elected Republican in America has politely said no, twice. Every few weeks, it seems, a new potential savior becomes the target of relentless pressure and speculation; most recently it was Christie, who despite having once suggested his own suicide as a means of ending such conjecture, made a spectacle earlier this month of seriously reconsidering his resistance, before again deciding to abstain. And yet, when you talk to establishment Republicans in Washington, most now seem, if not entirely enthralled with their choices, then at least resigned to them. National polls, which are often unreliable at this stage of a campaign, have shown a pronounced volatility in the field, with Herman Cain most recently surpassing Perry in some surveys. But most experienced Republicans still expect Romney and Perry to outlast their rivals. And in these two most likely nominees, insiders see the potential to remake the party’s image and to close its internal breach. The vexing question for Republicans is whether either man, Romney or Perry, has the capacity to do both things at once.
For the type of establishment Republican who merely endured the Bush years, there isn’t a lot to love about the prospect of a President Perry. A. B. Culvahouse, a former White House counsel to Reagan who is now the chairman of the giant law firm O’Melveny & Myers, told me that Perry’s style as a candidate reminds him of the tent revivalists who blew through town when he was a boy in East Tennessee.
While they roll their eyes privately at Perry’s coyote-killing-cowboy routine, a lot of the old guard — the “weak, tepid, milquetoast, establishment” Republicans, as Culvahouse wryly described himself to me — seem to view him as the best possible kind of Tea Party candidate, a far more desirable brand of populist than Bachmann or Palin. However much he may make a show of his disdain for Washington, Perry is nonetheless a three-term governor, and that makes him, at the very least, an honorary establishment type, the kind of guy with whom you can do business.
And yet there is a growing fear among Republicans that the things about Perry that might call to mind tent revivalism — the constant and overt religiosity, the naked appeal to popular resentment — won’t play well with independent voters and especially not with those who find it all too reminiscent of the last Republican president’s swaggering self-reliance. In a USA Today/Gallup poll in mid-September, 44 percent of voters said they were sure they wouldn’t vote for Perry — about the same percentage who ruled out Obama, and nine points higher than the percentage who definitely wouldn’t vote for Romney. And this was before Perry’s strangely garbled debate performance later in the month (and before it surfaced that he used to frequent a hunting ground affectionately known as “Niggerhead”). At the same time, Romney, who’s supposed to be the establishment front-runner, incites no great passion on K Street and Capitol Hill, where he is regarded as a sort of well-designed political android. “Mitt Romney is a really smart, experienced guy, and he may well be exactly what you need as president right now,” Charlie Black told me. “He’s not a gregarious guy who’s easy to get to know.” Still, as summer turned to fall in Washington, discernible mostly by the slow disappearance of seersucker, the denizens of the Republican fund-raising circuit began tilting en masse toward Romney. There was a sense that the field was more or less settled, and that Romney, with his moderate pedigree and private-sector résumé, was the candidate most likely to win in pivotal Rust Belt states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And if he wasn’t going to co-opt and transform the Tea Party movement in the way the establishment might have hoped, then at least he wasn’t going to recommend the hanging of Ben Bernanke- or run around repeating the charge that Obama was a socialist —
- something he pointedly refused to do,
The chief dilemma here, though, is that the guy who may be best positioned to take the Republican message to the heart of the electorate may not be the guy who’s capable of holding his fractured party intact. Perry is probably the candidate who can unify the insider and outsider elements of the party, because he’s a natural fit for the Tea Party and can mollify the establishment by incorporating longtime Republicans into his campaign. A good precedent for this might be the 1980 campaign. Reagan was a hero to movement conservatives, but he also
- shrewdly managed to reassure a nervous establishment
- by selecting George H. W. Bush
- I'd describe George Bush I as a globalist above all. America is a place to sell off piece by piece to those types. ed.
- don’t consider themselves core Republicans.
“If Romney becomes the nominee, two or three things might happen,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, told me. Kibbe’s organization, led by the former House leader Dick Armey, is probably the most influential Tea Party-aligned group in Washington. “First of all, people might hold their noses and vote for him, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to walk their neighborhoods for him or ask their neighbors to show up, so you lose a lot of the energy that defines get-out-the-vote efforts. Option B is to just stay home and throw up your hands and say: ‘O.K., I’ve been disenfranchised. I’m not interested in this election.’
“The other things they could do,” Kibbe said, “is split off and go third party. If you end up with the wrong guy as the challenger to Obama, it potentially creates a real dilemma for Tea Partiers. And they’re going to have to make one of those decisions.” One of FreedomWorks’s vice presidents, Adam Brandon, jumped in to remind me that Tea Party activists well remember last year’s elections in Florida and Alaska, where establishment candidates for governor and Senate, jilted by primary voters, turned around and ran anyway. The insiders won’t have a lot of credibility now if they argue that bolting the party is a treacherous act. Most of the Republicans with whom I talked over the past few months — though not all, by any means — were dismissive of the notion of a third-party candidacy. Such an effort, they pointed out, would almost certainly serve to get Obama re-elected, and for that reason no splinter group of conservatives would consider undertaking it, nor would any halfway serious candidate. They’re probably right, but then again, this assumes that we are still living in an age of rational political actors, where politicians run for public office because they actually want to serve or at least advance an agenda — an assumption that may be hopelessly out of date.
In today’s political arena, a certain class of outsider candidates seems mostly intent on achieving a kind of cultural relevance — the type of broader celebrity that attracts mega book deals and Twitter followers and reality-television contracts. (Palin, in a moment of astounding candor, recently mused that she might find the presidency just too shackling for her ambitions as a public figure.) So it’s not really all that hard to imagine some entrepreneurial candidate like Palin or Bachmann looking to fill the vacuum in the Tea Party movement sometime next year, especially if the popular narrative holds that the establishment has somehow triumphed again.
Even putting the presidential race aside, the friction between Republican insiders and outsiders will almost certainly manifest itself next year in other ways. Another wave of Tea Party-backed challengers for the Senate are already preparing to take on establishment candidates in states like Nebraska, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Indiana. Washington Republicans may rejoice that enthusiasm for these campaigns has been slow to build, but after all, the elections aren’t for another year, and at this time in 2009 no one had yet heard of Marco Rubio or Rand Paul, either. Tea Party activists who were protesting outside their Statehouses two years ago have now grown more sophisticated; they’re quietly organizing through social media, running local candidates and pressuring lawmakers in private meetings. “We’re not protesting in the streets now,” David Kirkham, the organizer of the Utah Tea Party, told me. “We are going one on one with state legislators.” Kirkham, a custom-car maker who was new to politics when I first met him last year, is now mulling a primary against Utah’s sitting governor or possibly against Orrin Hatch.
You can look at all this and say that the Tea Party has simply begun the natural process of being absorbed into the establishment, as its leaders become the next generation of legislators and Statehouse lobbyists, much like an earlier generation of social conservatives and crusading libertarians. But there is another interpretation, too, which is that the movement is actually starting to alter the makeup of the party from the bottom up, and it only appears to be losing intensity because its leaders are no longer interested in shouting into bullhorns. If that’s true, and if more Tea Party members start streaming into Washington in the years head, then the next chapter of Republican politics in Washington could look less like “The Empire Strikes Back” and more like “Attack of the Clones.”
“I think we’re going to have to have at least one more election cycle before people get that this isn’t just a typical wave in the business cycle of politics, if you will,” Kibbe told me. “We’ve described the Tea Party movement as a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And we mean that in the technical-economic term. You have tired leadership, and you have bad ideas and just an inability to serve customers well. And that’s when someone comes in with new management and cleans house and either restores the company or breaks it up.”
Kibbe’s metaphor sounded jarringly familiar to me, because it was exactly the kind of language I heard from liberal venture capitalists in Silicon Valley back in 2004, when they were busy fomenting insurrection inside the ranks of the Democratic Party. In fact, a lot of Kibbe’s rhetoric — about hostile takeovers and the “democratization of politics,” for instance — could have come directly from the left-leaning activists and donors who gained influence through forums like Moveon.org and Democracy for America in the latter part of the Bush era. It was this same process of “democratization,”
- the breakup of the party’s monopoly on money and manpower,
that ultimately enabled a black first-term senator to topple his party’s presumed nominee on the way to winning the White House.
There are practical explanations for why both party establishments have undergone some version of this same devolution. The most important, and most obvious, is the proliferation of broadband Internet and the way it has redefined, within the space of just a few years, the very concept of a political movement. Another is the change in campaign-finance rules, which incentivizes ideological contributors to send their checks to outside groups or set up their own, thus creating a network of parallel parties whose influence grows with every election cycle.
But of course, what’s really going on here is a broader cultural assault on the very idea of establishments, which has affected virtually ever other industry in American life in the last 20 years or so, from television networks and music labels to carmakers and local banks. The Tea Party may fade into history, but there will almost certainly be other Tea Parties, and more of them, affecting both parties and arising in ever quicker succession. To believe yourself now to be, literally, an establishment — that is, the one legitimate arbiter of just about anything in American life —
- is to be tragically misguided.
Some Republicans have accepted this larger reality. “I get annoyed with all the establishment types here who speak as if they’re supposed to be controlling everything, who sound like they’re annoyed when things happen that they don’t expect,” Bill Kristol told me. “I mean, welcome to the world.” What more pragmatic conservatives like Kristol are trying to do, ultimately, is to strike a highly precarious balance — to somehow embrace the Tea Party sentiment, as they must, while not allowing themselves or their party to become marginalized as a result.
“Like a lot of other conservatives in Washington,” Kristol said at one point, “ I’ve been slightly — not worried — but I’ve just regarded it as one of the things I can do as a genuine Tea Party sympathizer to counsel the Tea Party types to be sensible and not to go overboard and not to go in the wrong direction.
“From my point of view, I wouldn’t want them to win all of their fights,” he went on. “But I wouldn’t want them to go away, honestly. Now, maybe that’s too cute, and maybe I can’t manage it. And maybe I can’t tell Jim DeMint to cause this amount of trouble, but not that amount. And is there a risk he’ll win on an issue when I think it’s ill advised? Sure. But that’s democracy, and I still think that turmoil is the price you pay for a certain kind of vitality and vigor.”
I suggested to Kristol that by trying to exploit the fury of a grass-roots movement for their own ends, while also hoping to temper it, he and his colleagues might be playing with fire.
“The only thing I would object to in that formulation is that we could wish the fire away,” he told me. “The fire exists.”"
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Citations:
11/4/10, "Ruling Class GOP Declare War on Country Class Conservatives," RushLimbaugh.com
Spoken after the historic Tea Party victories in November 2010 that landed in the GOP because they had nowhere else to go, not because the GOP wanted most of them.
"The ruling class of the Republican Party doesn't want conservatives having any kind of a foothold, any success or any leadership in the party. ...(item half way down page)....So it appears to me they're (GOP) perfectly happy being in the minority if it means not supporting conservatives. (2/3 down page, Rush was using the term conservatives generally describing the new people elected in Nov. 2010)... Apparently the
- establishment Republicans
- will fight harder and more viciously to stop conservatives
- than to stop Obama and the left. "...(2/3 down page).
11/20/10, "Revolutionary Do-Over," Wall St. Journal, John Fund
Former GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, now a big-time Washington lobbyist, has already told the Washington Post that
- it's imperative for his tribe to "co-opt" the tea partiers arriving in D.C."...
10/25/10, "The Tea Started Brewing Under Bush," Timothy Dalrymple, Patheos.com
"The tea started brewing under Bush. It’s important that Democrats and Republicans alike understand this. Democrats know that they are about to suffer a rebuke of historic proportions, but it’s important they understand the reason and not imagine themselves the victims of racism or irrationality. And it’s important for Republicans to understand that their legacy of government growth and deficit spending is also suffering rebuke. The Republicans will recapture the House (if they do) not because Americans love the GOP but because the Democrats doubled down on the Republicans’ big-government tendencies....
The point is not exactly that President Bush was not a conservative, but that his administration precipitated a crisis of conservative identity within the Republican coalition. While Bush could identify with conservatives culturally from Kennebunk to Crawford, and while his judicial appointments and stances on ethical issues gave conservatives reason to support him, he took an activist view of government in the foreign sphere,
- to transform the world order in pursuit of democracy"...
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House GOP locks up any hope of ObamaCare defunding by preventing it from coming to the floor. Almost a year after the Nov. 2010 elections which gave the House GOP enough people to defund ObamaCare, they have it locked up in a committee.
ObamaCare needed to be defunded immediately and could have been, independent of the Senate. Now we find moves aren't even close to being 'marked up.' Proving again how well deserved the House GOP's minority status was before Nov. 2010 and deserves to be again. They love ObamaCare, despise the American middle class, and are happy being a tiny minority.
9/29/11, "Draft spending bill would defund Obama healthcare law," The Hill, Sam Baker
"House Republicans released a draft spending bill Thursday that would cut off funding for many parts of the healthcare reform law, though the bill remains deadlocked in the Appropriations Committee.
The draft legislation would attempt to derail implementation of the law. It would specifically block any money from going to the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight — the office handling the bulk of the implementation effort — as well as the recently disbanded office in charge of setting up the controversial CLASS program....
But the bill isn’t likely to see a markup any time soon. Although it would cut spending on a wide range of programs within the Health and Human Services Department, its total spending levels are still too high
- for two of the committee’s Republican members.
The budget allotted $139 billion for the bill that funds HHS along with labor and education programs. The draft released Thursday would cost $153 billion.
The draft also includes several policy riders, such as cutting off federal funding for NPR and the “Race to the Top” education program."
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5/23/11, "The Political Class continues to strongly oppose repeal, while most Mainstream voters favor it. A plurality (47%) of those in the Mainstream still think repeal is likely;
- 74% of Political Class voters disagree."...
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4/26/11, "Supreme Court allows ObamaCare to metastasize," American Spectator
"This protracted journey will allow Obamacare to embed itself in our health care system so deeply that, by the time the Court deigns to hear one of the challenges, it may be impossible to safely extract the tumor."...
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1/27/11, "How to Limit the Damage from Obamacare—Pulling It Out Weed by Weed," Ernest Istook, Heritage
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10/29/10, "Birth of a Movement, Tea Parties arose from conservatives steeped in crisis," Wall St. Journal, Blackmon, Levitz, Beraon, and Lauren
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P.S. In the state of NY in Nov. 2010 GOP primaries, I looked at who was backing each candidate and voted for all new people. Some big time establishment guys lost and upstart guys won. None of them were going to beat a democrat here of course. A rare exception was the recent election to replace Booklyn/Queens Rep. Anthony Weiner. The GOP almost doesn't exist in NY State. As I understand it, it's just a few weirdos who hang around making sure no one good gets in. ed.
via Rush Limbaugh
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