What was that I was saying about the Republican Party going bankrupt? From the website-that-must-not-be-linked:
With $11 million on hand at the end of June — and about $2 million in reported debt — the RNC’s paid get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort will be limited to just targeted House races, POLITICO has learned.
The same web publication reports that tea parties are ambivalent at best about fundraising:
“When you start chasing the money, you start having to compromise, and that’s where a lot of D.C. organizations go wrong,” said Everett Wilkinson, a South Florida financial adviser who runs two of the biggest tea party groups in Florida. “If we stay trim and we keep our overhead small, we won’t have to raise a lot of money and we won’t have to compromise. No one owns us.”
See, these people think democracy just pays for itself with a magic invisible hand. The tea parties were supposed to reinvigorate the moribund Republican Party, but they are instead leaving candidates cornered by their own base. Many Republicans will stay in office out of sheer inertia; no doubt some new ones will be elected, but not by the tea party.
I said this would happen. When you attempt to build a movement on quicksand, you get a Maine meltdown:
“Amy Hale is a liability to the Tea Party Movement,” Cucci wrote. “Amy Hale has been alienating people by prideful statements, pirating ideas, controlling statements and actions, manipulative actions, shunning advice and giving untruthful advice, which in some cases has resulted in no participation or refrained participation in the Tea Party Movement by those affected.”
Cucci says Hale’s rallies “are nothing more than a GOP promotional with little or no understanding gained for participants as to what the Tea Party Movement is about.” The worst sin, according to Cucci? The tea party rally Hale hosted in Dover, Maine, “was boring, not motivational as claimed by several participants.”
And then there’s Tom Tancredo:
It’s not like Republicans needed any help screwing up in Colorado. They were doing just fine on their own. But Tom Tancredo’s third-party gubernatorial bid has pretty much sealed the deal. Polls — and even some Colorado Republicans — suggest that barring some highly unforeseen circumstance, Tancredo’s presence in the race will all but hand victory to Democrat John Hickenlooper.
I’m going out on a limb now and laying a stake on the trifecta: Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, and Rand Paul will ALL LOSE thusly:
Conway came out swinging, mocking Paul for his early gaffes on the campaign trail and attacking Paul as “a waffling pessimist who wants to be the prince of cable TV.”
“There seems to be an emerging theme for Rand Paul and the Republicans this year,” Conway said. “And that theme is, ‘accidents happen.’”
So began a call-and-response routine with the crowd at the event that called for them to repeat the phrase, which came from Paul’s infamous explanation for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Paul is currently leading by five points in Kentucky, but polls are lagging indicators. It’s only August, Conway has just begun, and having seen previews of his ads in Vegas I am convinced he will beat Paul with or without the latter’s college kidnapping-and-dope scandal. More importantly, candidates like Paul and Bachmann and Angle cannot help themselves: they are gifts that keep on giving.
In these battleground states, it seems, Democrats have not forgotten how to attack; but even Beltway Dems are beginning to see the tea party as a wedge between Republicans and their base:
Kaine portrayed the November elections as a choice between his party, which under President Barack Obama has put into law a health care overhaul and tougher Wall Street rules, and a GOP-tea party combination that wants to roll back Democratic accomplishments.
“The Republican Party agenda has become the tea party agenda, and vice versa,” Kaine said.
If the GOP were to retake the House and Senate, they would try to privatize Social Security, end Medicare and shutter those two federal agencies, he said.
Democrats cited tea party activists’ statements and GOP support as they introduced a “Republican-Tea Party Contract On America,” a send-up of the 1994 GOP Contract With America that helped Republicans win control of the House for the first time in four decades. Kaine said the Republicans would repeal President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul and the recent Wall Street regulations. (Emphasis mine)
Given a shifting demographic landscape, the GOP has chosen to double-down on its previous strategy: exciting white, middle class people to vote against their own interests. The problem is that, while the tea party was noisy, it was never really all that substantial. Ironically, the tea party itself is very much like the incompetent characters portrayed in Atlas Shrugged.
I repeat my prior assertion: if the Democrats seize this opportunity, there is no reason why November cannot be a progressive storm.
URLs to the website-that-must-not-be-linked:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40772.html
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40800.html
