The Chamber of Commerce, for everything else it may or may not be about, doesn’t want recurrent run-ups to world-rocking debt defaults, government shutdowns that damp GDP, major corporate vendors going unpaid on government contracts. But when does the rubber meet the road? With the source of these dramas coming from the Republican party and more particularly its Tea Party wing, when does it stop funding these candidates?
I don’t expect the Chamber to start becoming a major funder of Democratic candidates, though there are more busienss-oriented Dems who might get that support. But what about intervening in GOP primary battles to protect the sane Republicans from Tea Party circumcellions?
Yet maybe we’re seeing some step toward that. Scott Reed, longtime Republican strategist, now firmly entrenched at the Chamber says “We are going to get engaged. The need is now more than ever to elect people who understand the free market and not silliness.”
Saying I’ll believe it when I see it sounds a bit more cynical and disbelieving than I am. But this will be a difficult thing to pull off, as tangled up in the GOP and conservative movements as the Chamber is and with all the gravitational pull toward the Tea Party.
