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Monday, May 26, 2014 11:45 AM UTC
GOP’s post-Obama problem: Why they’re lost without him — and with the electorate he helped create
The establishment vanquished the Tea Party by drinking its poison — but has no plan for life after this president
Topics: Mitch McConnell, 2014 elections, Tea Party, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Barack Obama, Editor's Picks, GOP, The Right, Democrats, establishment, News, Politics News
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. I want to challenge that a little.
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. I argued at the time that the story was not the Tea Party’s defeat, but its victory: the extent to which it had taken over the Republican establishment.
That didn’t seem true in the wake of Tuesday night’s election results, particularly in Kentucky. Credit where it’s due: Mitch McConnell crushed Matt Bevin. Sure, he did it by courting his Tea Party junior Sen. Rand Paul and by sliming and outspending Bevin. And sure, he won by a smaller margin than any incumbent GOP senator who’d faced a primary in the last 80 years.
But he won, even after making a deal with Harry Reid to reopen the government that was supposed to be his undoing. So did Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a Boehner ally with a Tea Party rival, while in Georgia, the three candidates tied to the Tea Party lost, to two more polished and mainstream conservatives, Rep. Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue, who face a July run-off. And looking ahead, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Kansas’s Pat Roberts and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander look likely to beat back Tea Party challengers. In 2010, when even conservative incumbents like Utah’s Bob Bennett and South Carolina’s Bob Inglis lost their seats in Congress, all of those races likely would have turned out differently.
Something’s changed, and liberals can’t ignore it. Democrats won’t be running against neophytes or crackpots likely to self-destruct before November. 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.
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In the most basic terms, the GOP establishment’s victory can be described like this: The party base is no longer falling for any wingnut Tea Party crackpot who rails against Obama and Washington. There will be no Christine O’Donnells or Sharron Angles this election cycle (though I wouldn’t rule out a sexist gaffer a la 2012 losers Richard Mourdock or Todd Akin). And while the “GOP establishment” has gone Tea Party, incorporating almost all of its most extreme political and policy demands, some in the Tea Party have gone establishment: The New York Times last week hailed the Ivy League, corporate credentials of Tea Party Senate nominees Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who are smooth-talking, expensive-suited operators in the mold of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, not Texas primary loser Steve Stockman, who was easily vanquished by John Cornyn in the first big 2014 loss for the Tea Party.
That won’t make them any more reasonable if they get to Congress, of course, but it might make them less likely to self-destruct before they get there.
Certainly the Tea Party “brand” has become far less popular than in its 2010 heyday: Today, just 15 percent of voters polled by CBS News say they are supporters of the movement – the lowest since pollsters began asking about the faction in February 2010. The tea party reached peak support (31 percent) in November 2010, and has fallen ever since. Even among Republicans, Tea Party backing has fallen to 32 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in July 2010. What does that mean?
To know what it really means, it would help to define what the Tea Party meant in 2010, and today. Chris Hayes came as close as anyone to defining it during his MSNBC election coverage Tuesday night: opposition to “runaway” government spending, particularly the 2009 stimulus, combined with hatred of “Obamacare” as the ultimate symbol of big Democratic government.
That seemed correct, but 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. It may be that some of the decline in the popularity of the Tea Party “brand,” even among even Republican voters, relates to that: More people recognize that hate him or not, the president won two elections, and he’s (probably) not going anywhere, rumblings about impeachment notwithstanding. Meanwhile, GOP voters know, because the GOP establishment has spent a lot of money telling them so, that the Tea Party cost Republicans control of the Senate. “Tea Party” no longer conjures up brave patriots in bright costumes, but losers who’ve cost the party elections, and whose Obama hatred not only failed to vanquish Obama but tainted the entire party with a toxic smog of racism.
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