What The Hell Is Wrong W/ Republicans?

Mostly because it doesn't appear to be available w/o registration (But we went ahead & registered. What do we care?) the proverbial good parts of a Clive Crook column. Nice image too.

Addressing the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last week, Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and a possible presidential contender in 2012, called Barack Obama the most radical president in US history and assailed his administration as a “secular, socialist machine”. Something is seriously amiss with an opposition that regards this as a proper line of attack.

Meetings such as this are not campaign events aimed at voters at large. They are gatherings of activists, intent on maximum fervour. Even so, to call the Obama administration “socialist” is risible. If anything, “secular” makes even less sense. Do Republicans regard universal health insurance as a godless undertaking? And since when, even in the US*, was “secular” an allowable term of abuse?

A moderate and intelligent opposition to the Democrats’ policies is badly needed. Apparently, nobody in the Republican party aims to provide it. Republican leaders seem intent on presenting the party’s angriest, most stupid and least tolerant face.

Problem solved: Reduce the party to just that one face.

Disenchantment with Mr Obama and the Democrats is especially pronounced in the political centre. (Conservatives, of course, were dismayed before the evidence was even in.) You might have thought this would commend a centrist platform to the Republican party approaching November’s mid-term elections. Swing voters decide who wins, and they were up for grabs. Why are Republicans steering to the right?

For several reasons. One is that many Republicans are furious and in no mood for compromise. Another is the emergence of the Tea Party movement – a populist small-government insurgency, disorderly but remarkably energetic. Somehow, the Republicans must harness this new force, or risk being split. Most important, though, is the fact that centrist voters are not yet demanding better solutions of the opposition. Come November, it seems they will settle for punishing the Democrats. The Republicans are moving right, and the centre – for now at least – is not objecting.

Yeah, blah, buncha centrist hooey. What does "the centre – for now at least – is not objecting" mean? That the mugwumps are marching along to "NO!"where, or that the Grand Old Party of "NO!" is leaving these probably imaginary David Broders behind in their stampede to extreme purity?

In a new Gallup poll, Americans’ favourable rating of the Democrats has dropped to 41 per cent, the lowest in this measure’s 18-year history. At the beginning of 2009, Democrats had a 55-34 point lead. Now the parties are tied. Most election pundits are predicting heavy Democratic losses. There is a good chance that control of the House will switch. In narrow electoral terms, the Republicans’ militant posture is working. This dynamic has disturbing implications. A populist-right Republican party is not a party of fiscal conservatives. It is a party of tax-cutters and middle-class entitlement protectors – budget deficits be damned. A populist-right Republican party has no trouble calling for lower taxes, opposing cuts in Medicare (the programme that poses the greatest fiscal danger), and deploring public borrowing, all at the same time. This, in fact, has been its line on healthcare reform.

That reform, with its $1,000bn of extra costs over 10 years, is now law. Democrats may flinch, like Republicans, at cutting Medicare to pay for it, but they have no strong objection to raising taxes once that becomes inescapable. A Republican-controlled House would have strong objections. It might very well refuse to do it, preferring possible fiscal catastrophe to higher taxes.

By the way, that large & unmentioned object you keep bumping into is military-industrial spending.

The Democratic party, for all its faults, is a broad coalition. There is such a thing as a conservative Democrat. Ideologically, the Republican party is shrinking even as it gains popular support. The parties used to overlap in the middle. That is the part of the political spectrum where trade-offs can be admitted, where balances between what voters want and are willing to pay for can be struck, and where fiscal conservatives usually live.

More centrism, though we suppose it should work about as described, & maybe used to when we were young. There must be a formula for how shrunken ideology can get before the return in popular support goes away too.

*Naff off, you sod.