You know how they say that generals are always fighting the last war? Boy, oh boy, does Juan Williams belong in that category:
Lawmakers in the mainstream of the Republican Party will face a rough time in the 2016 elections as the rhetoric of conservative talk show hosts and conservative activists lurches the party to the right, said Juan Williams. [emphasis added]
Stop the tape. This is the "Republicans need to be more like Democrats if they're going to politically survive" canard that is, like a stopped clock, only correct every sixteen years (JFK in 1960, Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992, Obama in 2008, Julian Castro in 2024 - which is the only reason why I am still somewhat skeptical about him swooping to the rescue next year). And, of course, paired with it the "Media is only trying to help Republicans by convincing them to jettison their entire 'extremist' base" chestnut. Because we "unevolved" wingnuts don't deserve to be represented in Obamatopia. All of it pretty much yawn-inducingly old hat.
Williams' next point actually has some validity:
In a column for the Hill, the author and political analyst for Fox News says the GOP is at a disadvantage going into election season, forced to defend twenty-four Senate seats — compared to Democrats who are only protecting ten seats — all while minorities, women, and young people are expected to have high turnout.
First of all, "minorities, women, and young people" - the so-called Obama Coalition - are not going to have high turnout because (1) women don't even belong in that category because there's a vast chasm between married women and single women, and (2) the other two categories aren't going to have a candidate who "looks like them," at least not on the Democrat ticket.
But Williams does have a point about the respective number of Senate seats the two parties have up for grabs. 2016 comes six years after the 2010 GOP wave election that saw them pick up seven seats following their previous two disastrous cycles in '06 (a six seat loss) and '08 (another nine seat loss on Obama's coattails). It could have been ten seats, but Tea Partiers kicked away low-hanging fruit in Colorado (with Ken Buck), Nevada (with Sharon Angle), and Delaware (with the execrable Christine O'Donnell). High Senate tides to tend to go back out again, as we saw happen to the Dems last fall. And in ordinary circumstances, next year's ebb would be unlikely to be anything as epic as Williams is trying to scare us into believing.
But current circumstances are far from ordinary, as he unwittingly broaches with this quote:
"The danger posed to Republicans by tea party politics is on display right now," Williams said.
He means ideologically, of course. Because he's a general fighting the last war, spouting leftwingnut conventional wisdom. What he's not "getting" is that he's actually right, but not in the way he thinks he is.
And that brings us to the following story:
When Republican Scott Walker arrives Monday at Iowa's state fair, he'll land in an unfamiliar position: he won't be the front-runner in the State that holds the first presidential nominating contest.
Like most every other candidate in the historically crowded field, the Wisconsin governor's standing in State and national polls has been hurt by the summer surge of billionaire Donald Trump, the party's front-runner.
No State is more critical to Walker's future than Iowa, where media expectations about his candidacy have grown to the point that anything short of a win in the February 1st caucuses is likely to be viewed as a serious momentum killer.
"I run into people who support him, but I think the polls reflect the fact that everyone is just struggling to get traction, outside of the three non-politicians," said John Bloom, Republican Party treasurer in Polk County, the state's largest.
Bloom, who is undecided in the race, was referring to Trump, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Hewlett- Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. He's not ruling out the possibility of a Trump win in Iowa.
"If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said no," he said. "But I think there is more commitment there to something. I don't know if it's for Trump, or this rebellion against our leadership." [emphases added]
Two partially contradictory, partially reinforcing factors. On the one hand, Donald Trump has become the last thing Republicans needed and the one thing that could actually send the Grand Old Party the way of the Whigs: The symbol, pied piper, and rallying point for untrammeled, out-of-control Tea Party rage that has subsumed even the conservative/constitutionalist principles in which they ostensibly once believed. All that matters to Tea Party Trumpsters is that he's telling them everything they want to hear in the "un-PC" way they want to hear it, and that he's supposedly an "outsider" and "not a politician". All of which means that Trump is, in fact, proving himself to be a master INSIDER and highly accomplished POLITICIAN, as well as a dismayingly skilled and classic demagogue to be able to recognize, exploit, and dupe a political demographic so thoroughly that they don't even realize they're being set up for a level of betrayal that would make their red-hazedly perceived archenemies. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, look like paragons of steadfast ideological purity and loyalty.
I'll say it again, folks: "Citizen-politicians" are a myth and always have been, politics is a profession, and the presidency of the United States is not an entry position. Donald Trump - and to a much lesser extent Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, because they at least actually are Republicans and conservatives and their motives are pure - is playing his slavering Tea Party supporters like a ten-cent flute. And meanwhile, the most conservative and electable candidate in the field, the natural Tea Party candidate, two-term Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, is being discarded by his natural constituency like an empty soda can, again, without their even realizing it.
But on the other hand - and this is where lies the lone, still-existing glimmer of hope - it is because of another self-destructive Tea Party tendency - flooding the zone with and splintering among multiple candidates - that a Donk Trojan Horse like The Donald might still be averted. Trump is endlessly hailed and proclaimed the "GOP frontrunner," but that is in a field of seventeen candidates, almost all of whom have vastly less name-recognition than he does. Which is another way of saying that, as I've been grousing for months now, there are too damned many Republican candidates. Indeed, there are a number of "true conservatives" - Ted Cruz is a rather garish example - that could be rising to the fore and the top candidate tier but are not because of the mass body-crush in the way and because The Donald is sucking up all the oxygen like President Skroob did to the planet Druidia in Spaceballs.
Think of Governor Walker as King Roland, the natural and rightful next leader of the GOP and the USA, being smothered by a wisecracking faux "populist" with the most ulterior of motives.
I say that because while polls show Trump leading the Republican field with only about a quarter of its support, that level is also at or pretty close to his realistic high-water mark. The same polls show that even a majority of Republicans will never vote for him under any circumstances, which means that whether as a hypothetical GOP nominee or, far more likely, an independent, he would be counting on "independent" and Democrat votes if he actually was intent on winning. However, if his only purpose in the race is to sabotage the GOP for Hillary like the Seahawks offensive line opening holes for Marshawn Lynch, all he needs is his Tea Party backers to accomplish that task quite effectively.
However, if that ludicrously distended, self-obsessed Republican field could be winnowed down to a more reasonable half-dozen or fewer - please, for God's sake - Trump's ceiling would be easily surpassed by the truly qualified frontrunners - governors, and more specifically Scott Walker, in other words - and we could wake up from this carnival-barking sideshow nightmare and get serious about actually electing a conservative Republican president to start the daunting, herculean, perhaps Sisyphian task of rolling back Obamunism once and for all.
Or we can all go over the cliff like Trump Legion in the heard of pigs and take the Golden Elephant - and more than enough Senate seats to crash us back deep into the minority - with us to smash on the jagged rocks below, while Mrs. Clinton looks on approvingly from the Oval Office.
Maybe she'd take back the House as well.
For years, decades, conservatives have accused - accurately - the GOP "establishment" of making ours "the Stupid Party". Now, however, it's the Tea Party that is taking that ignominious mantle, if they don't wake up from the Trump spell before it's too late.
UPDATE: Yes, yes, I know, Trump unveiled his purported immigration plan yesterday, which doubtless has single-issue TPTers gushing in paroxysms of orgasmic joy. Which is all fine and good - or would be if he meant a word of it - but Jim Geraghty asks an awfully inconvenient question - actually several of them, but I'll just highlight this one - about it in today's Morning Jolt:
If we increase the fees on legal immigration and entry, doesn’t that make illegal immigration and entry look more appealing? Without sufficient border security - because we’re insisting Mexico [which has precisely zero incentive to do so] pay for it - aren’t we shutting the door of legal immigration and leaving the window of illegal immigration open?....[I]ncreasing fees on legal immigration does amount to punishing people who are doing it the right way – and not-so-subtly implies that Americans don’t want Mexicans coming into the country period. [emphases added]
Thus playing straight into the leftwing smear of patriotic believers in national sovereignty and restoring meaning to the term "citizenship" as "nativists, xenophobes, racists," etc. Which sure looks like the image of us that Trump is trying to portray.
There is, in other words, a right way and a wrong way to reach our objective of cutting off illegal immigration and restoring sanity to its legal counterpart. Trump's plan may sound peachy-keen to you, my Tea Party friends, but it's chock-full of incentives that run at direct cross-purposes to what we're trying to accomplish. And I don't think that's any accident.
UPDATE II: Behold, my friends, Donald Trump without the fake hair, fake conservatism, and with a governing track record of executive experience of Tea Party wet dreams:
No, he didn't call the union trash a "loser" or a "zero" or ask him if his balls were bleeding. But Walk got his point across quite unequivocally with something Trump wouldn't recognize if it had posed nude for lesbo magazines: class.
Heck, he's even taking aim at Boehner and McConnell - what's not to like?
Beck said Walker could’ve been “weasely” and tiptoed around the issue, but he had a clear answer when Beck asked: “Will you go so far as saying that there are people in the GOP that are part of the establishment, like Mitch McConnell, that are part of the problem?”
“Yes. I hear it all the time and I share that sentiment,” the Wisconsin governor said. “We were told if Republicans got the majority in the United States Senate, there would be a bill on the president’s desk to repeal ObamaCare. It is August. Where is that bill? Where was that vote?”
The American people were also told that Congress would act to prevent illegal immigration, Walker said, but it was actually governors like himself who prevented Barack Obama’s policy deferring the deportation of millions of illegal [alien]s.
“It’s not because the Congress, a Republican-led Congress, did anything to stop him from doing that,” Walker said. “This is where the frustration is. This is why non-elected candidates are surging in the polls.”
C'mon, Tea Party Trumpsters - time to "come home" to the candidate you should have been backing all along.
No comments:
Post a Comment