The Myth That the GOP-Establishment is Back

While recent GOP primaries show some of the most extreme lunatic fringe of the Christofascit/Tea Party wing of the GOP defeated, it would be wrong to claim that the "GOP establishment is back" as is done in a column by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post.  Coming from a family of Republicans and having once held a GOP city committee post for 8 years, what passes today as the "GOP establishment" bears little resemblance to what that term once meant.  The swamp fever that afflicts the party base likewise has turned the so-called GOP establishment into something deranged as well.  The only issue is one of the level of relative insanity.   Gerson's column is correct in one regard: the so-called establishment is far more "conservative" than it once was, with conservative now translating to unhinged and insane.  The rest of the column is wishful thinking on Gerson's part.  Like so many others still in the GOP, he does not want to face the reality that the cancer in the party has metastasized.   Here are excerpts from his somewhat delusional column:

The unfolding GOP primary season is clarifying two points: The Republican establishment is back, and it is more conservative than you’d think.

In the North Carolina Senate primary, the establishment winner, Thom Tillis, was the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2011 legislator of the year and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association and National Right to Life. Yet he was attacked by tea party groups as a RINO, a Republican in Name Only — expanding that term to cover just about every Republican who doesn’t own a tricorn hat. 

Tillis’s main tea party opponent, Greg Brannon, possessed no apparent qualifications for public office except a sense of divine calling and a remarkable facility for quoting the Constitution. For Glenn Beck, this was more than enough. “I could tongue-kiss you,” Beck told Brannon during an interview, “and I’m not a guy who does that.”

But the Republican establishment — after years of being ambushed and accommodating its ambushers — was ready this time. Groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads spent millions to avoid the emergence of another Sharron Angle or Christine O’Donnell — candidates who motivate thousands and alienate tens of thousands. For the GOP, North Carolina was a victory of sorts: an expensive victory, consisting of avoiding disaster. 

This struggle has taken a while to fully emerge. At first, the GOP attempted assimilation.

The decisive break came when tea party groups began attacking solid Senate conservatives such as Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as quislings. Tea party leaders managed to confuse petulant, childish, counterproductive legislative tactics with constitutional fidelity. And Republican leaders finally realized that some tea party agendas — list-building, fundraising, presidential primary positioning — were inconsistent with their own. 

The GOP establishment backlash has been successful for a particular reason: It has been led by politically rational conservatives, not the RINO moderates of tea party nightmares. Rockefeller Republicans are as rare as giant pandas; both cause passersby to point and gawk. 

For some tea party groups and leaders, an ever-narrowing orthodoxy is the objective. Their approach resembles the more extreme forms of Protestantism, in which a passion for doctrinal purity divides and divides until there is a true church of one. The Republican Party, constituted to win majorities, has begun pushing back in primary contests. Which is necessary, and not sufficient.

The main problem with the tea party movement is not tactical or tonal but ideological. Its leaders quote the Constitution to end political discussions:
Some quote the Constitution as a substitute for a policy agenda. It is easier, after all, to memorize than to govern. But a majority political party will convincingly address public needs: routine educational failure, increasing higher-education costs, gaps in health coverage and the like. This is what self-government under the Constitution looks like. 

[T]he GOP needs electable candidates. It also needs for those candidates to have something useful and hopeful to say.

 In reality, the GOP that Gerson envisions no longer exists and, in my view, cannot be recaptured unless and until such time as the Christofascists/racists/Tea Party lunatics are truly removed from all positions of influence.  Given that some of these are now holding seats in Congress, the cure will be difficult to implement.

GOP Learns Nothing: RINO Hunting Season Opens in Earnest

Part of me takes delicious pleasure in watching the Frankenstein monster like Christofascist/Tea Party base of the Republican Party to continue to turn on the so-called GOP establishment and push the party closer to long term extinction.  When I left the GOP years ago over the rise of the Christofascists within the party and its inability to honor the concept of separation of church and state I predicted that long term the GOP was committing suicide.  With the advent of the Tea Party (which I see largely as the unpopular Christian Right hiding under a different name), things have only become worse as these elements of the GOP become increasingly open about their opposition to modernity, their blatant racism, their religious extremism, and their contempt and hatred towards anyone they deem "other."  Now, in the wake of the government shutdown debacle, these same lunatics are trying to target the few sane Republicans left.  If they succeed, it will only hasten the GOP's decline.  The only question will be how much additional damage will be done to America before the GOP becomes a small, permanent minority party.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the quest of the crazies to eliminate moderate - and sane - members of the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans in the House of Representatives have such low approval ratings, according to recent polls, that a Democratic takeover looks possible. But before Republicans can defend their majority, they first must stave off a slew of primary challengers who are targeting incumbent members of Congress.

The new spate of primaries mostly target those Republicans who failed to toe the Tea Party line during the recent budget standoff, voting to open up the government and raise the debt ceiling. But the challenges are by no means limited to the crew of moderates. Even House Speaker John Boehner is not immune.

On the day the government shutdown began, J.D. Winteregg, a high school French teacher and founder of a group called The Ohio Accountability Project, announced a primary run against Boehner. The campaign will, at the very least, give a place for grassroots Republicans to vent their outrage against the GOP leadership while waiting for polls to open. In an interview, Winteregg said his campaign sends a message “that no one is safe.” And momentum for his run, he said, has been growing in the wake of Boehner’s budget capitulation in Washington.

In North Carolina, Taylor Griffin, a former aide to President George W. Bush, also announced his bid for Congress just as the government shut down. Griffin is running against Rep. Walter Jones, an antiwar former Democrat who was ranked by National Journal as the House’s most liberal Republican in 2011. Jones, Griffin conceded, has been pretty good on fiscal issues, but the challenger said the fiscal skirmishes left him “frustrated with how broken things had become, and I thought my congressman was part of the problem.”

It remains to be seen whether these races will bring out the full firepower of the conservative financial and grassroots army. Often outsiders have bested incumbent and establishment picks only after groups such as FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Club for Growth, and the Tea Party Express have gotten involved in a big way.

The GOP establishment stupidly embraced these nutcases in the past out of cynical expediency.  Now, the monster has turned on them.  I am enjoying my predictions come to pass.

Can the GOP Establishment Fix the Party's Primary Problem?

This blog has noted frequently the the GOP's descent into insanity began when the Christofascists were allowed into local city and county committees from which they slowly took over much of the GOP primary process like a slowly metastasizing cancer.   The result has been that sane and moderate candidates find themselves unable to get nominations in the typically low turn out primaries that are populated by the religious extremists - here in Virginia, The Family Foundation rallies the nutcases - and their Tea Party cousins.  The result has been that even Ronald Reagan could not win a nomination contest nowadays because he would not be extreme and crazy enough to satisfy the Christianists.  Belatedly, the so-called GOP establishment has realized that their short term expediency of embracing the lunatic fringe is turning into a form of political suicide.  An article in Politico looks at the so-called establishment's first effort to regain control of the primary system.  Here are excerpts:

The disastrous 2012 election and embarrassing fiscal cliff standoff has brought forth one principal conclusion from establishment Republicans: They have a primary problem.

The intra-party contests, or threat thereof, have become the original sin that explains many of the party’s woes in the minds of GOP leaders. It’s the primaries that push their presidential nominees far to the right (see “self-deportation” and “47 percent”); produce lackluster Senate candidates (Todd Akin has almost become a one-word shorthand); and, as seen most vividly in the last two weeks, dissuade scores of gerrymandered House members from face-saving compromise while politically emasculating their speaker.

What to do about the primaries has become Topic A in many a post-election Republican soul-searching session, and now the first steps are being taken to address the issue. For Senate Republicans, that means a modified return to their 2010 posture of openly playing in primaries. A retiring House Republican is starting a super PAC to help House members challenged from the right. And an RNC commission is mulling over changes to the party’s presidential primary.

In the Senate, where at least five GOP losses in the past two election cycles could be attributed to primaries, Republican leaders are planning to intervene in selected 2014 races to ensure preferred candidates win the nomination.

High-profile Senate Republicans are going to try to pre-empt bloody primaries with aggressive, early recruitment and support — effectively trying to clear fields.

Further, top Senate Republicans have made clear to outside groups that they’d like the third parties to not exist simply as entities that air attack ads against Democrats in general elections but to play a more hands-on role in GOP primaries.  .   .   .   .  Translation into non-Senate speak: The big-money establishment Republican super PACs like American Crossroads need to serve as a counterbalance in primaries to conservative outfits such as Club for Growth and former Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund.

In the House, look no further than the Plan B debacle and the 151 Republican “no” votes on the final compromise to understand how primaries have become the chief political threat in a GOP caucus in which more than half the members faced nominal general election opposition this year.

“A lot of the Republican Conference strategy has been to not put members in a difficult primary situation and that makes it tougher for us to sign off on a deal,” lamented former Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), a Boehner ally.

“When a center-right Republican is in a primary and is being targeted by some group as a RINO, we’re going to make sure we have their back,” said LaTourette. “Not just with speeches and press releases but with money.”

There is more that is worth a full read.  Personally, I believe the effort will be difficult since the lunatic fringe is now far too entrenched in the local committees.  The patients have taken over the asylum and putting them back on the fringe will take a great deal of work and money - and calling out the crazies for what they are.