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?
McConnell says no new shutdown in January 2014 or maybe ever. “One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid 1990s and the second kick was over the last 16 days.”
One of the interesting things about this is that this is clearly not the lesson taking by House Tea Partiers who see this as a mere three month time out before the next shutdown and debt default crisis. And I strongly suspect that Democrats will be asking opposing candidates starting now to pledge never to shutdown the government or threaten debt default again.
Here’s a novel campaign strategy from a GOP state Senate candidate in New Jersey.
Post shutdown, Republicans are saying the key is they need more senators to defund Obamacare. That seems like a pretty elementary insight. And that goes along with President Obama’s point/jab today that if Tea Partiers really want to repeal Obamacare they should focus on winning an election. But the real story, I think, is that these standoffs are seriously weakening Republican chances of winning back the Senate next year. The House is in more jeopardy post crisis. But gerrymandering, concentration of Democrats in urban areas and simple incumbency still make that a really heavy lift for Democrats.
The Senate is another story.
I would just like to welcome everyone to the ‘We Just Didn’t Shut the Government Down Enough‘ era.
Rep. John C. Fleming (R-LA): “See, we’re going to start this all over again.”
So far Republicans picking through the rubble of the shutdown debacle have identified two main culprits for their defeat: the media and moderates within their ranks.
The second of those is the richest because the lesson learned for these Republicans isn’t that they overreached, it’s that they didn’t go far enough. A lack of ideological purity and true commitment to the cause is what sank Republicans. If they had only held together tighter, then Obama and the Democrats would have blinked. It’s an echo of post-election analysis in 2008 and 2012. If only John McCain and Mitt Romney had been more conservative, the White House would have gone Republican, too.
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If only Republicans had remained unified, this all would have turned out so much better.