Can Boehner tame Tea Partyers?

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:17:00 +0000

“If there’s a mandate in yesterday’s results,” said House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday, “it’s a mandate to find a way for us to work together.” Republicans, he said, were willing to accept “new revenue under the right conditions,” to get a bipartisan agreement over the budget.

We’ve heard this before. The speaker came close to agreeing to an increase in tax revenues in his talks with the president in the summer of 2011, but relented when Tea Partyers in the House made a ruckus.

But Tea Partyers may be more amenable to an agreement now that the electorate has signaled it doesn’t especially like what the Tea Party has been up to.

Consider Indiana, where the Tea Party had pushed out veteran GOP Sen. Richard Lugar in favor of Richard (rape is “something God intended”) Mourdock. Mourdouk was soundly defeated Tuesday by Rep. Joe Donnelly.

In Missouri, the Tea Party was responsible for Todd (some rapes are “legitimate”) Akin winning the Republican Senate nomination – which gave Sen. Claire McCaskill a landslide victory.

And in Montana, Tea Party nominee Denny Rehberg was no match for Sen. Jon Tester.

Tea party hero changes tune to woo Ind. moderates

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:56:00 +0000

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Richard Mourdock became one of the tea party's biggest winners of the 2012 primary season when he knocked off veteran Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar in a brutal campaign built on his contention that Lugar was too old, too out of touch and too friendly with Democrats — a RINO, Republican in name only.

But the movement's biggest RINO hunter is now changing his tune as he tries to woo moderate voters in a tight race that stands as a key test of the tea party's ability to win outside the nation's most conservative states.

Mourdock is matched in the general election against moderate Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly, who is running even in recent polls despite Indiana's Republican tilt. Suddenly, gone is the strident rhetoric in which Mourdock proclaimed that bipartisanship meant Democrats coming over to Republicans' thinking and that winning meant he would "inflict my opinion on someone else." In its place are support for parts of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, pledges to protect Democratic-championed programs like Social Security and Medicare, and even the once-shunned notion of compromise.

Welcome to "Extreme Makeover: Mourdock Edition."

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Can Boehner tame Tea Partyers?

Tea party hero changes tune to woo Ind. moderates