10/16/2011, "Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.?" NY Times Magazine, Matt Bai
"Establishment Republicans may prefer Romney to Perry, but their assumption is that either man can be counted on to steer the party back toward the broad center next fall, 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 [Dick Lugar, age 80, was ultimately defeated in the primary, much to his outrage], 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 the people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them.”...(p. 1)
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 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....
Today’s (Republican) 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....
“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.”...
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 [this was the first time in 40 years that Republicans controlled the House], 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 [from the Nov. 2010 grassroots landslide] 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, but I’ve got to
do it for the country.’” 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 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.
[Comment: This is sickening]
...........
NY Times 2011 image below includes: Huntsman, Gingrich, Perry, Cain, Bachmann, Santorum, Romney, Ron Paul, Palin, Christie:
 |
| Oct. 2011, NY Times |
Oct. 2011 Image caption: "The G.O.P. elite tries to take its party back. Credit Photograph of cutouts by Victor Schrager for The New York Times. Politician photographs: Julio Cortez/Associated Press (Huntsman); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (Gingrich and Perry); Chris O’Meara/Associated Press (Cain, Bachmann, Santorum); Scott Audette/Reuters (Romney); Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank via Associated Press (Paul); Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press (Palin); Matt Rainey (Christie)."
.......................
Revolutions are stopped by simple "co-opting:"
Nov. 2010: Lobbyists: it's "imperative to co-opt the tea partiers:"
11/20/2010, "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."...
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Comment: As Vin Weber said, after only 6 months in the Beltway, many are dazzled to learn it's "the greatest opportunity of a lifetime.” Which suggests something like 'I won the lottery,' 'got a license to print money,' or the like. You couldn't make the same fortune 6 months ago. What's different? You have the American people to sell.
As this article describes the scene 5 years ago, I see only a tragic waste of time and energy which continues in 2016. The Republican Party Establishment is a criminal waste of humanity and must be stopped. It must be separated from the Republican Party. Generation after generation comes of age and finds to its shock that the US has a one party system: the globalist, open borders, endless foreign war, Commission on Presidential Debates party. They think, this isn't right. Let me take time that I don't really have to spare--time away from my family and responsibilities--to save this country from the globalists breathing down our necks.
Things are much worse than anyone can imagine if after only 6 months in the Beltway many think it's "the greatest opportunity of a lifetime."
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