What Will The GOP Do Without Obama in The White House?

Since January, 2009, the sole agenda of the Congressional Republicans and their supporters at the state level has been to obstruct and defeat any and every initiative put forth by the Obama administration.  The agenda has played well with the GOP base which has increasingly been hijacked by white supremacists and overt racists not to mention the similarly racist Christofascists.  That a black man occupies the White House has been what has galvanized these nasty elements of the GOP.  But the question will become, what will the GOP do once Obama leaves the White House.  Without the visceral hatred of Obama, how will the GOP hold together its unwashed and ignorance embracing base?  An article in Salon looks at this question.  Here are excerpts:

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.

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.

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.

Hayes left out one thing: irrational, implacable hostility to Obama himself, often fed by a wellspring of conscious and unconscious racism. The Obama election, combined with the Tea Party backlash, served to make the GOP clearly and unmistakably the party of white people, and it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon.

But in a few years, the GOP will lose the galvanizing and unifying issue of Barack Hussein Obama. 

All of that leaves Republicans in the position Politico’s Todd Purdum correctly identified last week as “losing for winning.” Having ceded to the far right on issues like immigration reform, health care, climate change, tax reform, infrastructure spending and the minimum wage — often repudiating historically Republican ideas in the process — they are left with no way to reach out beyond the confines of the 48 percent of the voters — albeit 60 percent of white voters — they seem to have consolidated.

[T]he Washington Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti was surprisingly candid about why it’s going nowhere:

The outreach Republicans make to single women and to minorities inevitably repels the groups that give the party 48 percent of the popular vote—Christians and seniors and men. As has been made abundantly clear, 48 percent of the popular vote does not a presidential victory make. But 48 percent is not quite something to sniff at either. That number can always go down.

The Alison Lundergan Grimes vs. Mitch McConnell contest is a microcosm of the way the two parties have grappled with the changing electorate. Republicans have made elections safe for elderly white male incumbents, for now anyway, while Democrats are banking on a young college-educated woman, a pillar of their emerging coalition.

But if Republicans prevail, they’ll face the 2012 electorate and then some in 2016. And they’ll likely be doing it with a cast of Tea Party characters, from Rand Paul to Ted Cruz to Rick Perry, since so-called “moderate” Chris Christie is almost certainly mortally wounded, and Jeb Bush only less so. The GOP has neither the people nor the policies to make them serious presidential contenders. And while I never disagree with Digby, here I do: I don’t think they’re entirely “winning by losing.” A party that can never compete for the White House can’t survive.

So let the GOP establishment savor its spring primary victories. It has no answer for its looming post-Obama political future. They’re dusting off the anti-Clinton playbook, but they may not find it works as well, beyond the angriest confines of their angry right-wing base.
Call it the Tea Party or not, those folks will always be a problem for the Republicans. But they’re getting older, and crazier, and soon they’ll be gone. If it keeps pandering to that fringe, so will the Republican Party.