Even as the Republicans try to shift focus to what they see as the Democrats’ loss of political capital, the ruptures in the GOP just won’t disappear. Now, Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., has brought the spotlight back to the party’s warring factions. In an interview with the Greenville News, Inglis said the famed Reagan coalition of social and fiscal conservatives is “running on fumes.”
Inglis, as a self-described member of the “religious right,” goes on to tell the paper that he is unable to identify with what he calls the “hard right” faction of the party (i.e., the economically conservative branch), which he says “doesn’t care about abortion. They just want you, government, out of their pocketbook, by golly.” Certain “hard right” activists, Inglis claims, have told him that they are willing to let people without health insurance “die on the steps of the hospital” to make a point about the problem of “free riders.”
And it’s here that Inglis is confronted with the classic WWJD dilemma: “I’m thinking there was a guy named Jesus who had some things to say about these kinds of concepts. And I don’t want to live in a society that lets a few test cases die on the steps of the hospital.”
That said, it’s not as though Inglis is about to cross the aisle on healthcare (or much else for that matter), he’s voted with his GOP colleagues in the House 92.2 percent of the time -- including on a vote against expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance program.
Inglis does, however, have a history of -- to coin a phrase -- going rogue on the Republican Party. Earlier this year, he called on Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., to apologize to President Obama after Wilson infamously shouted out “You Lie” during Obama’s speech on healthcare reform to a joint session of the Congress. Inglis also came under fire from constituents in a town hall meeting last summer when he advised them not to listen to Glenn Beck. And when faced with the prospect of Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., turning down hundreds of millions of dollars from Obama’s stimulus package, Inglis told his party to “lose the stinking rot of self-righteousness.”
Of course, Inglis’s feuds with fellow Republicans haven't always been about moderation: During Mitt Romney’s run for the GOP presidential nomination, Inglis told the former Massachusetts governor in no uncertain terms that Mormonism could not be equated with Christianity.
Republicans may have been working to co-opt the Tea Parties that have been so popular on the right, but fundamentally the movement always had soem anti-GOP feeling at its core. And while the protests may still end up helping Republicans next year, in part by getting conservative voters, to borrow a phrase, fired up and ready to go, there are some signs that the whole thing could still end up badly for the party.
One of those signs is contained in a poll out Monday from Rasmussen. The pollster asked respondents to imagine that "the Tea party organized itself as a political party," then had them choose between generic Democratic, Republican and Tea Party candidates in their district. Not too surprisingly, the Democratic candidate ended up benefitting from the split, with 36 percent of respondents -- a plurality -- saying they'd vote that way. But in a somewhat shocking result, 23 percent said they'd vote for the Tea Party candidate compared to 18 percent who chose the Republican and 22 percent who said they weren't sure.
When just unaffiliated voters are counted, things are worse for the Republicans: 33 percent chose the Tea Party candidate, 25 percent opted for the Democrat and only 12 percent picked the Republican.
Still, things probably aren't nearly as bad for the Republican Party as this poll would indicate. For one thing, it's hard -- impossible, really -- to imagine the Tea Parties organizing into a single political party in time for next year's midterms. (They can't even keep the protest movement from fracturing.) And polls that ask about third parties always find more support for the third party candidate than he or she ends up with come Election Day.
This is, however, another demonstration of how powerful the Tea Party movement could be in a situation where a moderate Republican's running in a swing district. Call it the Doug Hoffman effect, after the conservative candidate who ended up forcing out the GOP's choice in a Congressional special election held in upstate New York earlier this year.
WASHINGTON -- Considering it celebrated a movie about a movement that prides itself on its rough edges, surly resistance to government and populist spirit, the D.C. premiere Wednesday night of "Tea Party: The Documentary Film" made for kind of a strange affair.
To begin with, the event was held in a federal building. Yes, it was the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center, so it was sort of on message. But still, it was the most expensive federal building ever erected at the time the place was finished, with a total cost of $768 million. (Then again, Reagan did more to bloat Washington's budgets than his loyal followers tend to remember.) Waiters paid by whatever government contractor manages the center circulated after the movie ended, serving little trays of government contract-purchased hors d'oeuvres to people who had just cheered lustily for a couple hours of anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric. The contradictions didn't end there. The crowd that gathered to watch a movie about people shouting at Congress began the night by listening politely to a panel discussion featuring Sen. Jim DeMint, three sitting members of the House and ex-House Majority Leader Dick Armey. The film celebrates the grass-roots spirit that tea party organizers say drives what they do, but the premiere was thrown by FreedomWorks, a conservative lobbying and policy outfit funded heavily by big corporate donors and right-wing foundations. FreedomWorks, which Armey chairs. At least the group had a sense of humor about that last bit; instead of a red carpet, the movie's producers and other bigwigs entered the auditorium on a swatch of AstroTurf, complete with football and soccer line marks.
All that is sort of in the nature of the tea parties, though. The Republican establishment knows it likes what it sees in the movement, yet GOP operatives admit they aren't really sure where it's all going. Big conservative interest groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity lend financial and organizational support to tea party rallies. But walking through the crowd at any gathering, it's easy to find people who are clearly just so stirred up by what they hear on Fox News Channel and read on right-wing blogs that they decided to show up and yell about it for a while.
And it was mostly that spirit -- "Doggone it, let's yell about what's going on in our country for a while" -- that animated the movie. A lengthy look at six activists from Georgia (near where the filmmakers live) who came to the Sept. 12 anti-government march on Washington, the documentary swings between their stories and why they got involved and red-meat rhetoric, mostly shot at the rally. There are plenty of ominous fades and scary music thrown in, as well. It mostly looks very professional. A video producer from outside Atlanta, Luke Livingston, put it together, working with a young crew of politically like-minded types, on a budget of about $30,000 that he told me he's hoping to recoup by selling DVDs online. He attended an April 15 Tax Day protest, then got caught up in the whole thing when his neighbor, Jenny Beth Martin (who is also profiled in the movie), founded Tea Party Patriots
The narratives about the characters are sympathetic, even if they're a little quirky. One, an ex-graphic designer for the Secret Service, spends most of the movie dressed up in 18th century garb from his Revolutionary War reenactment hobby and speaking in a British-esque accent that slips off occasionally. Another man, Nate, is a young African-American conservative, who voted for President Obama but realized, not long afterward, the error of his ways. "They're taking your money right out your pocket," he tells a friend at a barbecue in the movie. The movie tries to paint the tea party people as just regular folks who got angry. It downplays any racial element to the backlash against Obama, most plainly with Nate. "I don't see racism" at the rallies, Livingston told me. "Is everybody white? Yeah, but you know, there are a lot of black people, too." A whole disc of outtakes focusing on black conservatives is in the works, he said.
But the tone of the movie is also bombastic and paranoid, much like the tea parties themselves. "They are scared," one character says of his fellow marchers, and after watching the film, it wasn't hard to see why. The country, in the filmmaker's hands, appears to be lurching out of control, careening wildly away from decent American values and toward a corporate/socialist hybrid that you don't have to understand politically to know you don't like it. Healthcare reform is only the next step in the conspiracy. Take a look at the film's trailer here, and you get a good sense of what the long version is like:
All that scary stuff is happening even though most people didn't want it to, the movie argues. "The silent majority is going to be heard loud and clear," a woman at the Sept. 12 march says in the film. Considering Obama got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, won the widest majority in years and helped spark the highest voter turnout in decades, it's hard to imagine she's anywhere near right.
Then again, the tea party crowd often has a problem with math. On Wednesday night, there were about 300 people at the screening. And all of them cheered wildly when the movie showed time-lapse video of the Sept. 12 march, in an attempt to buttress the right-wing myth that more than 1 million people showed up there. (Most sane people say the rally drew about 70,000.) So let's round up a bit from that 300 estimate and say, oh, 4,000 hardy patriots crammed themselves into the auditorium. (Never mind that it only seats about 500.)
The audience was a mix of young conservatives in suits and pearls and, well, old conservatives in suits and pearls. There was a cash bar at the reception after the screening, doing brisk business in whiskey and lite beer. Almost as soon as the movie was over, I was cornered by two of its fans, who began interrogating me about who I wrote for and whether I share their zeal for limited government, low taxes and all things decent -- and their terror at what they saw happening in Washington. "It's one thing coming down the pike after another," one of them, Gail Volm, from Falls Church, Va., said. "You can only take a fire hose in the face for so long and then you have to say, 'Stop, it is enough.'"
The mood at the screening, like in the movie, alternated between festive and feisty. Livingston, the man behind the movie, said his mission was partly to tell the story of some of the activists who headed to Washington for that 9/12 march, and partly to have fun. "Make it entertaining," was one of his guiding principles in making the film. (Another? "Honor God.") But reminders that the business of tea parties is quite serious were never far away. "This is not a movement that's trying to pull the Republican Party to the right," DeMint said before the movie started. "It's a movement that's trying to pull the Republican Party back to where America is today." Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said she didn't understand why taxes had to be so high: "If 10 percent is good enough for God on Sunday, it's for damn sure good enough for the government on Monday." The newest conservative hero, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., showed up to pander a bit, too.
But it was the movie, not the elected officials, that really roused the crowd. As the film ended, the cameras focused on a speech from the Sept. 12 rally by one of the few black speakers there. "Patriots, stand up!" he exhorts the audience, both at the march and in the theater. An American flag waves, and rock guitar riffs start getting louder. "Stand up! Stand up!" As the credits rolled, everyone in the auditorium was on their feet, cheering wildly, ready to go take back the country.
ACORN is rigging our elections, and undoing the basic principles of the American Revolution. Also, the community group is stealing from the poor. But that’s not surprising, because for all intents and purposes, it’s a mafia-type organization. Oh, and its tentacles are everywhere in the federal government, extending all the way to the president himself, and he in turn is shielding the group from prosecution.
This was the substance of a hearing that eight Republican members of Congress -- or, as they styled themselves, the “Joint Forum on ACORN ” -- held Tuesday. Over the course of the hearing, representatives and witnesses actually leveled all the above charges at ACORN, declaring the issue to be one “of importance to the American people,” as Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., put it. (If he restricts the definition of "the American people" to members of his own party, he's probably right.)
Since its employees were caught on tape in the prostitution-tax evasion sting, ACORN hasn’t had a lot of defenders. But if you thought the subsequent halt of federal funding for the group was the end of the story as a political issue, then you don’t know the modern GOP. Despite the grievous damage to the group’s reputation, Republican officials aren’t content just to damn ACORN with evidence of its clear failings. Instead, at the hearing they insisted on citing an array of unconvincing, vastly overblown allegations -- with a bit of racial panic thrown in -- as evidence that ACORN is destroying America and must be prosecuted.
Probably the top charge against ACORN is that it tampers with elections. The rhetoric surrounding this argument continues to be out of line with the substance. Said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., “Our forefathers fought for, I don’t know, what, eight years to defeat the British because they didn’t want taxation without representation. And now we’re watching all these things being taken away, just frittered away, because we won’t enforce the law? It’s just criminal.”
As ever, there have been no instances cited of actual fraudulent voting, despite the implication that the entire electoral apparatus of the country is tainted. Nobody thinks voter registration fraud is a good thing, but the kind of fraud in which ACORN employees have been involved is extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of an election. The fraudulent registrations aren't intended to be used -- they're a way for the employee to squeeze some additional money out of the group by serving as proof they worked more than they actually did.
At the hearing, there was a new wrinkle to the argument about registration fraud, an idea that by dumping a stack of inaccurate registrations on local election boards shortly before the deadline, ACORN somehow disenfranchises legitimate voters because the boards can't handle the workload. Again, however, there was no evidence provided for the claim.
Still, there's no stopping these guys. Iowa Rep. Steve King took the crusade to bizarre new heights, saying he carries an acorn and a copy of the Constitution around all the time, to remind himself of the threat the one poses to the other. Then there was witness Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative election lawyer, who thinks that the failure to prosecute ACORN implicates the entire law enforcement apparatus of the federal government. Said Spakovsky:
Congress should not only hold direct hearings on ACORN and its activities, but also oversight hearings of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Internal Revenue Service to obtain information on any investigations they are conducting into ACORN. If those agencies are not conducting any investigations, they should be required to explain why they are not carrying out their enforcement duties.
That would be, of course, almost exactly the argument that spurred some of the Bush administration's infamous firings of U.S. attorneys. The judgment of the fired prosecutors that there was no criminal case against ACORN for election fraud, in this line of thinking, didn’t exonerate ACORN -- it showed that the U.S. attorneys were incompetent at best.
And who could disagree, considering the almost superhuman way in which ACORN can apparently throw its weight around? After all, as several speakers at the hearing suggested, the group is just one huge criminal front. And, as Rep. Smith pointed out, ACORN’s got a guy in government. “President Obama previously served as ACORN’s lawyer, participated in ACORN training sessions in Chicago, presided on the board of two organizations that funded ACORN’s Chicago chapter.”
There are two separate points that need clearing up here. First, the president was never an employee of ACORN. He worked for Project Vote, which is now affiliated with ACORN but was not at the time, though the two groups were close. He also represented ACORN, alongside two other lawyers, in one case. Also on ACORN’s side in that case was the Department of Justice. Second, it could be literally true that Obama was an employee of the group back in the early ‘90s, and it wouldn’t really be that damning a charge. That’s because, despite Glenn Beck's fantasies, ACORN is not a vast criminal conspiracy. What it is, instead, is an often horrifically incompetent and sometimes corrupt but frequently helpful organization.
It’s easy to focus on the horror stories about ACORN (and important to condemn its various bad acts), but accounts of its role in bringing political power and useful advice to poor people go largely unheard. It should be possible, in other words, to work on a vast, successful and widely lauded voter registration drive without being smeared as a big-city gangster. Granted, ACORN isn't helping itself when it fails, many years running, to clean up its act. But it's also clear that at this point, that doesn't really even matter -- for many on the right, including members of Congress, the myth of the omnipotent, evil group is all that matters now.
By a wide margin, Americans consider Rush Limbaugh the nation's most influential conservative voice.
Those are the results of a poll conducted by "60 Minutes" and Vanity Fair magazine and issued Sunday. The radio host was picked by 26 percent of those who responded, followed by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck at 11 percent. Actual politicians -- former Vice President Dick Cheney and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin -- were the choice of 10 percent each.
Asked to choose from among seven presidents, Americans tapped John F. Kennedy as the one they'd like to see added to Mount Rushmore. Kennedy polled 29 percent, with Ronald Reagan second at 20 percent.
With all the talk on the news about whether Americans should have the choice of a government-run health insurance plan in any health care reform, only 26 percent of those who responded said they felt confident explaining the "public option" to someone who didn't know about it.
Half of Americans chose laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as a ceremony in which they'd most like to participate. That swamped the other choices: lighting the Olympic torch, tossing the coin to open a Super Bowl, starting the race at the Indianapolis 500, ringing the opening bell at the stock exchange and throwing out the first pitch at the World Series.
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The random national telephone sample of 855 adults was conducted by CBS News from Nov. 6-8. The margin for error is plus or minus three percentage points.
Anybody who expects this column to lampoon beauty-pageant contestants has another think coming. Last time I made a satirical thrust in that direction, two women whose friendship I treasure coolly informed me they'd been Rodeo Queens of their respective county fairs. Did I have a problem with that?
Absolutely not. Indeed, during a sojourn at an excruciatingly correct liberal arts college, I once reacted to a campus newspaper crusade against the sin of "lookism" by urging students to contemplate "The Iliad." The oldest narrative in the Western literary tradition (circa 1500 B.C.), and what's it about? An overrated jock named Achilles, and Helen, a troublemaking beauty, aka "the face that launched a thousand ships."
So no, it didn't start at your high school, this business of hunks and cuties getting too much attention. It's human nature. Nor will it end with the ritual humiliation of Republican sex symbols Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin.
Said humiliation, in the media-driven, Dionysian cult of celebrity that's rapidly overtaking American political culture has been not so much fated as voluntarily entered into and all but agreed upon by the well-compensated victims. The only question is how much cash their notoriety helps them to accumulate before everybody gets sick of them and the next Holy Hottie comes along.
Yeah, the former Miss California USA got sandbagged. Anyway, who cares what a 22-year-old in high heels and a swimsuit thinks about gay marriage? Do they ask quarterbacks about the Stupak Amendment? Anything Carrie Prejean said was sure to annoy half the TV audience busily engaged in calculating her sex appeal to three decimal places.
Her awkward rejoinder favoring "opposite marriage" infuriated the questioner, a Hollywood gossip maven who styles himself the "Queen of All Media." After the pageant, Perez Hilton called Prejean a "dumb b----." When she objected, he went deep into the gutter, describing her with the coarsest possible term for the female genitalia. His Web site features scores of attacks on Prejean earmarked "icky-poo."
Clowning like Hilton's, of course, hurts the gay rights cause as much as Prejean's subsequent behavior embarrassed straight Christians she purported to speak for. But because she'd given the wrong answer -- and never mind that, as Sarah Palin pointed out, Prejean's position is basically identical to President Obama's -- liberals who normally denounce "sexism" only snickered.
The embattled beauty queen who soon began making the conservative talk-show rounds promoting a hastily written book describing her deep piety and victimization also happens to be a real knockout, who, if you ran into her in the grocery store, would make you think, "Wow, that girl oughta be Miss California USA." Or something.
Poor Sean Hannity practically had steam coming out his ears listening to Prejean alibi about how the sex video she'd made strictly for her beloved boyfriend ended up going public. Then seven more sex videos and a few dozen nudie photos emerged, and Carrie Prejean's brief career as a martyr to liberal hypocrisy basically ended overnight.
Great beauty always threatens as many people as it enchants. So nice try, but it looks as if you're going to have to get a real job after all. Which brings us back to Sarah Palin, who quit the best job she's ever had to capitalize on her newfound celebrity. The former Alaska governor and beauty pageant runner-up got the book rollout of every author's dreams for her ghost-written memoir, "Going Rogue."
Far from persecution and mockery, Palin got the red-carpet treatment. On supposedly liberal CNN, Jessica Yellin asked, "Can't we just acknowledge it? Sarah Palin is sexy, and she doesn't seem to hide from it. She shows her gams. She openly embraces her femininity."
Her "gams"? Yellin, a Harvard graduate, must have majored in Frank Sinatra studies. She also complained that dames like Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein "keep their femininity under wraps." It's definitely true that older broads avoid bicycle shorts.
Even at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum rhapsodized over Palin's "sex appeal that practically oozes out of every pore." Liberal and conservative commentators alike engaged in hair-splitting debates about Newsweek's "sexist" cover photo -- the one she posed for, just as she agreed to appear on "Saturday Night Live," sit for an interview with Katie Couric, etc. Anything to promote Sarah.
Personally, I'm immune to Palin's charms. Her voice alone would send me to a monastery. But no matter: Making a fetish of your sexiness and your holiness is a dangerous game. Fans can be fickle, demanding a thematic consistency rarely attainable in real life.
Palin appears far too clever for a comic pratfall like Prejean's. But how long before her enraptured public notices that she spent her triumphal comeback trashing other Republicans, sneering "Heathers"-style at Katie Couric and exchanging insults with a 19-year-old kid?
CEDAR CREEK, Texas -- Rick Perry strode across the stage last Wednesday night and leaned over into the microphone. This was his moment to shine; two dozen of his fellow Republican governors, and a couple of hundred big GOP corporate donors, were gathered at a barbecue to celebrate Republican victories and look ahead to more to come in 2010. And Perry, the governor of Texas, wants very much to make sure he's celebrating next year, despite what could be a nasty primary challenge from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to secure the Republican nomination.
Which made his remarks a bit of a mystery. "Virginia is for lovers," he drawled, in an apparent tribute to Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell, who had just finished talking. "Texas is for jobs." He called up his wife, and some of the other governors' wives, to the stage. "Hey, back in the back," Perry called out. "Y'all hold it down just a minute -- we're fixing to introduce the ladies. Yeah, I want them all up here." Then he rambled through another five minutes about the weather, the trials and tribulations of being a rookie governor and an introduction of the night's musical entertainment, before kicking back to party with the rest of the crowd. At least he didn't talk about Texas seceding from the union, like he did back in April. Meanwhile, his opponent missed the whole thing; Hutchison was stuck back in Washington debating healthcare reform, where she insisted the new mammogram guidelines were merely the first step in a sinister government plot to ration medical treatments.
Welcome to the Lone Star State, where the politics next year are shaping up to be as bizarre as anything else in Texas. Perry, who's been governor since George W. Bush ambled off from Austin to the White House in 2000, is seeking his third full term in office next year, extending a tenure that's already broken all of the state's records. Hutchison, the first woman to represent the state in the U.S. Senate, has been in Washington since 1993. She says she's so committed to the race that she'll resign her Senate seat to run -- but not until after the March primary. (Democrats are likely to coalesce behind Houston Mayor Bill White as their candidate, though he hasn't yet officially declared he'll run.)
In the process, the campaign could wind up going a long way toward helping the Republican Party determine whether it wants to try to appeal to swing voters, or double down on the tea party-loving, Glenn Beck-watching, Sarah Palin book-buying crowd that helped the GOP lose New York's 23rd Congressional District for the first time in over a century earlier this month. Facing a starkly conservative primary electorate, Perry has, well, gone rogue. Besides threatening to dissolve the United States over the Obama administration's policies while addressing a roaring tea party crowd in April, Perry also refused to take $556 million in unemployment aid as part of the economic stimulus package. He talks about the 10th Amendment with the kind of fervor most Republicans reserve for the gun-toting Second; at the GOP governors conference, he urged his colleagues to "stand up and push back against Washington, D.C."
Hutchison, meanwhile, hasn't exactly racked up a liberal record in 16 years in the Senate. But she's more of a country club Republican, firmly conservative on economic issues but not a full-on culture warrior. She voted for the first federal bank bailout last fall and has supported keeping abortion legal, though she also frequently votes to restrict access. If she can wrest the nomination from Perry, that could be a sign the GOP will resist the urges of its conservative id. If she can't, though, it could mean other Republicans will take Perry's pandering to the tea party crowd to heart, and turn the party even harder to the right than it's already heading.
Judging by the early indicators, at least, the conservatives may prevail. Hutchison's poll numbers have dropped steadily since she got into the race over the summer. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, tells anyone who will listen that he wants Hutchison to quit the race so Perry can win the nomination. Perry's first TV ad made it clear he plans to run against Washington as much as against Hutchison -- which could be the right strategy in Texas. "She's claiming, 'I'm from Washington, and I'm here to help you,'" says Austin-based GOP pollster Mike Bonaslice, who's advising Perry. "Good luck with that spin right now. Republican primary voters aren't too keen on what's coming out of Washington the last year or so."
Hutchison's campaign isn't exactly sitting back and taking the abuse. Her own first TV ad promises, "I'm going to do everything I can to stop the government takeover of healthcare." Her campaign comes down to vociferously opposing the White House on issues that matter to Texas conservatives, and bashing Perry for talking tough but not delivering. "Perry is all talk, that's all he's ever been," says Terry Sullivan, Hutchison's campaign manager. "He says what he thinks folks want to hear at any time in his political career."
But that hasn't been enough to endear her to the true believers. "Texas is really -- as I like to say -- a beacon of sanity, fiscal sanity, particularly compared to Washington," says Peggy Venable, Texas state director of Americans for Prosperity, the group that put together the April tea parties. "Most Texans support pushing back on Washington; we certainly don't want to see Washington's policies carried out on Texas." She's backing Perry personally, though AFP is barred from endorsing any candidate. "It'll be tough for Kay Bailey Hutchison to run against Gov. Perry without talking about what's wrong in Texas," Venable says. "And many of us feel like what's wrong is primarily in Washington, not in Texas, and so I think a lot of people aren't going to appreciate a negative campaign in that respect."
Meanwhile, the most hardcore conservatives may not support either Perry or Hutchison. The chairwoman of the Wharton County Republican Party, Debra Medina, is running a grass-roots campaign for the nomination well to the right of both of the major candidates. Her platform includes eliminating property taxes, nullifying federal laws that interfere with Texas sovereignty, banning all abortions and encouraging Texans to buy even more guns than they already have. (Except for the property tax bit, though, that's not all that different from what Perry is running on.)
What Republicans are dealing with in Texas -- and in Florida, where conservative darling Marco Rubio is challenging Gov. Charlie Crist for the GOP nomination for Senate, and in a handful of other races around the country -- is just more fallout from the last few years in politics. When Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, some Republicans figured it was because the GOP had lost touch with voters; other Republicans, ideological kin to the ones who would wind up hurling tea bags at the White House last spring, figured it was because the GOP had lost touch with itself. The elections in Virginia and New Jersey this fall offered one way forward for the party -- present candidates who stick to economic issues, keep whatever radical social agendas they might have in mind tucked firmly away, and don't let Sarah Palin come to town and alienate the moderates. Between now and March, Texas may offer another path, the same one the party's activists are increasingly insisting on following. It could be a bumpy ride for them -- but it should be fun to watch for the rest of us.
Sarah Palin Goes Rogue in New Book: Part 1
The Palin Victory Speech? Ouch!
The Honeymoon's over.... But not the Marriage
What a Difference a Year Makes
On Finding the Source Code of Republican Talking Points