US politics from outside the beltway


The Republican Party is eating itself

Conservatives have forgotten that Americans are pragmatists first, ideologues second.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney smiles as he is introduced during a campaign rally at Somers Furniture on May 29, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photograph: Getty Images.

We say we are pro-life and then say we want abortion to be legal. We say we're mostly economically conservative but then say we like Medicare and food stamps. We say we want affordable health care and then say that the law that makes it affordable is un-American. What gives?

Part of it is the media. It can badly distort reality. But part of the reason (I think the greater part) is that Americans are so often lied to. Europeans have no doubt heard of the impact of Citizens United, the US Supreme Court case that permits unlimited sums of money to be spent on elections. This is the ruling that allowed Newt Gingrich to survive the GOP nomination process for much longer than he would have under prior conditions, and it allowed Mitt Romney to take the GOP nomination without the political benefit of charm, charisma or likeability.

Europeans, however, may not have heard of the army of secretive front groups that stealthily spread corporate propaganda. Recently, one of those advocating for the coal industry paid people $50 each to attend a regulatory meeting in Chicago. The goal here was creating the illusion that coal enjoys mass grassroots support when in fact it does not. This same tactic prevailed in 2010 when billionaire-backed groups like the Center for Protect Patient's Rights created the false impression that the Tea Party was a bottom-up conservative "insurrection." It funneled more than $44.5 million in 2010, much of it provided by two people: Charles and David Koch.

"Grassroots" isn't the only way the power elite masks its unpopular and oligarchical agendas. So is "small business." Few things are more sacred in Washington than the entrepreneur and small-business owner. Carrying its mantle, a group called the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) is challenging the constitutionality of Obama's health care reform law along with 26 states. The US Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in June. Meanwhile, a cursory look at the group's leadership suggests it has long-held ties not to small business but to Big Business Republicans. 

Its president is a former lobbyist for the steel industry who served in Ronald Reagan's White House. Its chief lobbyist served in the first Bush administration before working for Citizens for a Sound Economy, a think-tank financed by the Kochs. Citizens for a Sound Economy is now part of the brothers' Americans for Prosperity, which, along with FreedomWorks, underwrites much of the Tea Party. And the NFIB's communications director once worked for the American Legislative Exchange Council, which, as a service to state legislatures, writes "model legislation" that often undermines the right to collective bargaining. The Kochs are known for their anti-unionism.

But in politics, lies don't last forever. Eventually, there is a reckoning, and in the case of the president's health care law, a GOP reckoning may be on the horizon.

Consider Congressman Allen West of Florida. Over the weekend, he told a liberal blog that if the Supreme Court strikes down the law, it has to be replaced with something. That is, as a practical matter, something has to do done, and as a political matter, it's important to consider features of the law that Americans now like. Those, in West's words, would include: allowing children up age 26 to be covered by a parent's plan, outlawing discrimination based on "pre-existing conditions" and expanding drug coverage, aka closing the "donut hole."

For those paying attention, West's remarks amount to a tiny incendiary device going off beneath the skullcap, as West is one of the beneficiaries of the Tea Party "insurrection" and probably best known for saying that more than 80 Congressional Democrats are members of the Communist Party (they're progressives, but that's the same thing, right?). He and other Tea Party conservatives (libertarians mostly) won office by slamming "Obamacare" as evil socialism, and now, here he is, saying, well, some of that socialism is kinda sorta OK.

Unsurprisingly, West is up for re-election, as are many other Congressional Republicans (the House has two-year terms). And some of them, even among the GOP's leadership, are saying privately that Obamacare ain't all that bad. This has inspired worry among ideologues and swift reprimand from conservative groups like FreedomWorks, which demands that none of the law be re-packaged. Ever. FreedomWorks and others scare the bejesus out of Republicans because of the cyclical threat of primaries. They recently gave the boot to Indiana's Dick Lugar. He was the Senate's longest serving member.

This puts the entire party in a position that perhaps only presidential candidate Mitt Romney can fully appreciate. As he turns his attention to the general election and starts courting mainstream "swing" voters, Romney must constantly protect his right flank from trumped up charges of being a RINO (Republican in name only). Same for House Republicans. They must appeal to mainstream voters who are only now warming up to the health care law while ducking the ire of the conservative power elite.

The irony is that the power elite is hoping to elect candidates of dubious electability. The more ideological they are, the less likely Americans are to vote for him. Americans are pragmatists first, ideologues second. Fixing the problem is more important than who's right, and the problem is so clearly that health care costs too much (it grew at twice the general rate of inflation).

The other irony is that the power elite, by backing candidates of dubious electability who themselves parrot the power elite's missives of misinformation, are setting themselves up for failure. They have manufactured an entirely self-contained world of delusion and hysteria that has no application to real-world issues. That is, they aren't offering solutions unless you count preserving the status quo as a solution, and Americans, despite our abundant confusion, know that the status quo is not sustainable.

The next couple of months are going to be a doozy for the radicalised Republican Party. Either it navigates this political mine field, repudiates the propagandists or gives itself entirely to the theatre of the absurd, in which case we may really be witnessing a party eating itself. Fun!