Though it’s encouraging to see a CBS News poll showing that the debt ceiling fight is hurting Republicans the most of all, I doubt that this will discourage the Tea Party wing, since a majority of the public isn’t happy with anyone’s handling of their hostage crisis. If your fundamental belief is that the country will be better off with less government because government itself is a bad thing, it’s no big deal if our main representative institution, Congress, is viewed as a worthless, do-nothing repository of indecipherable procedure.
The House teatards just won a wave election by running against Congress, and they think they can repeat that trick. So, the number they’re looking at isn’t the public’s approval of their work in Congress, it’s the public’s overall approval of Congress. As long as the latter number is somewhere north of zero, they see a major political opportunity. It may be crazy ideology that started this hostage crisis, but it’s cold political calculation that’s keeping it going.
aisce
it’s not a bad plan. the biggest threat to the future republican party is barack obama. not even because he’s president now, but simply what he represents.
republicans have to make sure there aren’t any more barack obamas. people who genuinely seem to care about honest, competent governance? and can inspire new generations to think and feel the same way? they have to be destroyed. they have to have their spirits broken. they have to be made cynical, and kept out of politics.
politics has to be a filthy word (well, more than it is), that nobody outside of corporate hacks and sociopaths would dare give their lives to. and that fewer and fewer voters bother participating in.
beltane
It is certainly a strategy that helped another extremist party during the last century. I hate to think of what “freedoms” the right-wing will inflict upon us when they gain total power.
wonkie
The R wave was an anti-incumbent wave. Failure to raise the debt limit and the resulting chaos will probably provoke another anti-incumbent wave. It would be an anti-R wave if we had a functioning professional media in this coutry, but we don’t.
Han's Big Snark Solo
They also ran on “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”. What they didn’t tell us was that they think they can create jobs by giving Paris Hilton a tax cut.
Also too, they ran on “Democrats are gonna kill Medicare.” What they didn’t tell us was that their true complaint was that the Democrats were going to take too much time in killing Medicare, and that they, the Teabagger Republicans, could kill it much quicker.
Villago Delenda Est
What we have are propagandists for a parasite overclass eager to keep the host alive a bit longer. Well, for the forseeable future, anyways…to the end of the current fiscal quarter.
beltane
The solution to all this is to instil a certain amount of venom in the portion of the population who are not teabaggers. If the Republicans want to turn the young and the non-Aryan into a cynical, frightened and apathetic sub-class of American, it is the job of the Left to cultivate and harness the anger that will inevitably result from this. Let the teabagger segment of America reap the whirlwind so to speak.
Mnemosyne
We were listening to a “This American Life” from a couple of weeks ago that included a piece about the political upheaval in Wisconsin. It really struck me how completely taken aback the Republicans and their supporters were that people were angry with them. Like the woman who was shocked and surprised that her son’s teachers wouldn’t speak to her anymore just because she supported the Republicans in taking away the collective bargaining rights of teachers.
It’s like they’ve become completely disconnected from the reality of their actions and genuinely don’t realize that passing laws that restrict teachers’ unions actually affect the actual teachers, some of whom they know personally. So they get all butthurt that the teachers they know are so meeeeaaaannnn to them for, like, no reason, and it just perpetuates their victim complex.
Loneoak
Buuuut beltane, that sounds like actual, hard, political work. I would rather whinge about how Obama failed me!
Loneoak
Mnemosyne, I had the same reaction to that story. That woman was so fucking naive I could hardly believe it. Of course if you spend all your time demonizing me, demeaning my work, attacking my livelihood, and literally stealing my retirement funds to give it to millionaires, I am not going to be friendly toward you just for being a Real Murikin that sent your brood to my school.
Cain
@Loneoak:
Pretty much. Easier to blame Obama than to blame your own worthless ass for not getting on your feet to help.
FlipYrWhig
“Lisa, I said ‘lamb,’ not ‘A lamb.'”
/homersimpson
Tom Q
I’d make a slight correction: the Tea Folk THINK they won by running against Congress, but the actual terms of the election were “skewed off-year turnout goosed by particularly bad economy”. Obviously it’s possible the second part of that equation can be repeated in 2012 — though I’m of the opinion the economy will be improving by at least minor measures, lessening the peak-of-recession impact on voting — but the turnout skew simply won’t be repeated.
The fact that Tea People continue to believe it was that vague Anti-Congress feeling (rather than concrete and somewhat predictable elements) that swung the election will lead them down a path that can detroy them. Believing your own press is never a good option.
rickstersherpa
A good thing for us of this tribe to remember is that the biggest “percieved” threat to the majority of the Republican conference is losing an election to someone even further to the right in a primary. Until there are some motivated “moderates” voting in Republican primaries, this is the Republican Party we will have to deal with from sea to shining sea, but most especially in the South. They will try to avoid going to the David Duke extreme, because they no that can be toxic to the rest of their agenda, but they will get as close as they dare (see Jim Demint and James Infofe, both complete nut cases and both practially Senators for Life from their respective states). However, in the Northeast and Midwest, especially since the Repub governors are doing such a great job of getting the Democratic base motivated for the 2012 election, the Repugs will be able to save some of these seats only by the grosses gerrymandering.
Mnemosyne
@ Loneoak
Some of the other reactions were fascinating, too. It seemed as though some people were flaming mad at the Democrats for running away because they had a sneaking feeling that maybe voting to kill unions wasn’t right, but they couldn’t face that since they’d voted in favor of taking away union rights (or for politicians who voted that way), so they focused their anger on the Democrats who made them uncomfortable by pointing out that the Republicans were wrong.
alwhite
If your basic belief is that government is incompetent then why would you ever want to have competent people in charge? It explains Katrina, it explains EPA, DoJ and so many other things done to us by the wingnuts & their masters.
OzoneR
Actually, at least in the New York area, they did.
General Stuck
The GoP is a swirling cloud of chaos and crazy, just below the surface, that will be pushed to the surface more and more as the election nears, and reach a zenith when they choose what flavor and degree of crazy as a prsenit candidate, to personify and concentrate as a focal point for all the various whackjob factions vying for the wingnut brass ring.
I’ve run through my head all of the hopefuls, and what the likely national and GOP voter base reaction will likely be. And can find no sane scenario that will hold up during the stretch run strains of a presidential general election. All of the picks are either too crazy for the general populace, or not crazy enough to the tea tard activist base, that is about all that is holding up and nominating a spent ideology for governing this country.
The voters got us into this mess, mostly by laziness for voting and thinking critically about their democracy. They are the only ones that can save us as well. The jury is out. And I have no clue which way that worm will turn at this time. The tribal forces are very strong, and should never be counted out over common sense. We shall see as this thing moves on down The Yellow Brick Road.
Davis X. Machina
@Mnemosyne:
The consumer-satisfaction model may be a hella idea for a business, but isn’t going to routinely deliver good governance. Edmund Burke was right.
Zifnab
I think this idea that the Republicans and the Tea Party are going to either completely triumph or be utterly destroyed is a bit naive.
The Tea Party isn’t going anywhere. We’ll see them for the next half-dozen elections at the bare minimum. And so long as the voting bloc exists, politicians will cater to it.
What’s more, gerrymandering in red and purple states has cemented Republican presence for years to come. And the anti-voting laws are doing a decent job of disenfranchising more and more eligible voters. Ohio, for instance, is passing its second batch of voter-id laws. Why? Certainly not because of the non-existent voter fraud.
Meanwhile, although minorities and the youth vote are growing sick to death of the GOP, they’re also the ones getting aggressively disenfranchised. New voting laws in Texas make a student id invalid for proving identity, but a gun license perfectly acceptable. Who do you think is going to suffer from these laws?
The deadlock will continue for the foreseeable future. Democrats aren’t going to see another landslide ’08 victory, but Republicans won’t seize the White House in ’12 at this rate and they’ll be hard pressed to hold the House and take the Senate.
I’m getting ready for another 2 years of divided government.
jrg
I don’t think that’s a fundamental belief. It’s a talking point that’s managed to stick in low-information voters’ heads, because they’ve had years of tax cuts without the corresponding cuts to benefits like Medicare.
The rent is coming due. I don’t think it will work out the way the Norquists of the world think it will. I think they are setting themselves up for a huge shift left, with corresponding tax increases, particularly for the wealthy.
That’s why I take issue with Thomas Frank’s argument that backlash conservatives vote against their own interest. They don’t. They’ve been conditioned to believe that trade-offs don’t exist. When those morons figure out that the Easter bunny isn’t paying for Grannie’s medicaid, and tax cuts for billionaires ultimately mean she’ll be eating cat food under a fucking bridge, there will be hell to pay.
catclub
20.
JRG @ 20: “That’s why I take issue with Thomas Frank’s argument that backlash conservatives vote against their own interest. They don’t. They’ve been conditioned to believe that trade-offs don’t exist. When those morons figure out that the Easter bunny isn’t paying for Grannie’s medicaid, and tax cuts for billionaires ultimately mean she’ll be eating cat food under a fucking bridge, there will be hell to pay.”
Is there any historical analogy that would show any hell got paid (excepting 1789 France and 1917 Russia)? I cannot think of any. Maybe this time it IS different? maybe those cases are conveniently forgotten. I just do not know.
Brachiator
I don’t think this is quite true. The area Party people never had much of a coherent economic agenda, just the fantasy that if they could magically return the country to the 19th century, then Real Americans(tm) would have conservative ponies and unicorns.
The problem, of course, is that we don’t have deadlock, but the active opposition of the GOP to government by Democrats and, increasingly at the state level, defiance and rebellion against federal authority by Republican governors. The result has been the slow, steady dismantling of government and society.
WereBear
There was 1932 United States. Roosevelt beat Hoover in an absolute blowout that lasted for decades; basically, right up to Nixon. The good times rolled enough for people to get bloated and complacent and assume they could be greedy and stupid and there would be no payback.
I’m getting an inkling they are learning otherwise… again.
Bokonon
Speaking of lazy voters – it is disheartening to see that a sizeable number of people blame Obama and the Congressional Democrats (equally, or more than equally).
You can blame the media, you can blame partisanship, you can blame craziness or the influence of talk radio or low information voters … but these results is still scary in a situation that absolutely screams out for apportioning blame SOMEWHERE ELSE. Like the people that created this crisis in the first place. Like, you know, the GOP. Those guys. The ones lighting stuff on fire, waving pistols in the air and taking hostages, standing right up front of everyone.
If the media blames this on “both sides”, and the public blames the institutions for not delivering the right results, then are the Republicans going to feel the full consequences? I don’t think so. And I believe that is exactly the GOP’s calculation.
James E. Powell
I don’t have a good handle on what the great mass of Americans see and hear on the news because I don’t watch it, so I’m curious whether the dominant message is ‘both sides are to blame’ or ‘the Republicans are forcing the country into default.’ Are Democrats all over the country pounding the latter, or are they expecting the corporate press/media to do it for them? They can’t leave it up to the president, alone, to get the message across.