TPM Reader JB picks up the thread on cracked parties and decapitated leaderships …
About your post this evening…it goes back just a couple of years, to the last government shutdown crisis in 2011, and I don’t think that’s far enough to understand what’s happened to the Republican Party, or at least to the GOP in Congress.
Remember that up to the beginning of 2007 the Republicans had not only the White House but majorities in both houses of Congress. They’d held them for some time. They had the power to set the agenda for the country, for several years, and then they lost it.
The Republicans who lost it were mostly those the media speaks of as “responsible” Republicans now — people who either worked in the Bush administration or were that administration’s most faithful water carriers on Capitol Hill. In the last years of Bush’s administration his approval ratings crashed to historic lows, taking those of his party with it. And then the economy collapsed.
It is all too easy to think of today’s GOP in Congress as a party in which the animals have taken over the zoo. It has people who are unhinged by the idea of Obamacare, or are bought by monied interests, or are bitter about the idea of a black President, or are just slackwits and poseurs, according to this line of thought. And the GOP has all of those things.
But what it also has is a decapitation problem. The leaders of the GOP up until a few years ago lost all credibility with the public — including some of the Republican public — and no one has emerged to take their place. This is actually a product of the dominance of the Bush administration (and the Bush campaign infrastructure, not necessarily in that order) within the party beginning in 2001. No major Republican who came into public view before 2009 has any record of having clashed with America’s least popular modern President on anything important (apart from how much to beat up on Hispanic immigrants). With that President and his record now thoroughly discredited, the door is open to some pretty weird stuff.
Recall that the Republican Party went through a crisis in the mid-1970s during the Watergate period. At that time, it was able to turn to a number of well-known Republicans who shared many of the substantive positions taken by the disgraced Nixon administration but were not identified with Nixon himself. Ronald Reagan, obviously, was the most prominent of those. The GOP itself was able to use the aftermath of the Watergate disaster as an opportunity for growth.
It’s hard to see how that happens now. Reagan could campaign as the loyal, principled un-Nixon Republican in the late ’70s, as could many others; even today’s Tea Partiers don’t acknowledge the depth and scope of the disasters visited on the country by Bush and his people. They denounce Washington, and spenders, and “the left,” in passionate, even fevered tones, and have no one within the Party with standing to slap them down. They also have a very influential permanent campaign infrastructure with a vested interest in encouraging the idea that one good election cycle will put Republicans back in the driver’s seat in Washington.
The Tea Party tree has roots planted in the century’s first decade. The strife within the party is really a battle between people who prospered during the Bush period and people trying to drive the GOP toward something else — toward less government today, maybe toward something else tomorrow.
