The Republican spin machine has been working over marks like Marc Ambinder, and they’ve got him convinced that this time the Presidential primary will be different:
The end result is that the party has conspired to nominate the most electable conservative candidate and quickly. Challengers must prove themselves much earlier. Deep pockets and good field organizations will become more important relative to free media generated by tactical maneuvers and conservative radio hosts.
In other words, the RNC has finally disenfranchised the crazies this time, just like the last dozen times. The proper response to this RNC spin headlines this post, because it’s not just the Presidential race, it’s the whole brand.
Here’s one example from a local race, New York’s 25th Congressional District, currently held by 84 year-old Democrat Louise Slaughter. We had two challengers announce this week. One is a true Tea Partier who is so wedded to the Constitution that he won’t run on a party line but instead will be a true independent fighting for repeal of gun control and Obamacare. The “reasonable conservative” in the race, running on the Republican line, used to write columns comparing the teaching of global warming and evolution to Hitler Youth indoctrination. That’s the range of choice Republicans are giving voters in a district which went for Obama by double digits in the last two Presidential elections.
No matter how much work the RNC puts into wiping the party’s ass at the top of the ticket, the rest of the ticket is full of Teanderthals pooping out Hitler references.
Poopyman
I don’t think they see a downside to this.
Schlemizel
The sad part is that some percentage of baggers will manage to eek out a win and spread their poop all over the government of my country. I am not sure I will live long enough to see an end to the insanity that has grown so large & powerful over the last 35 years and I no longer have any confidence that the nation is strong enough to survive the damage these bastards are doing.
Schlemizel
Damn I’m old note:
Today is the 35 year of “Sunday Morning”
Next month is the 50th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show.
I just looked because I remember seeing this one too & thought it relevant, its 58 years since Elvis was on Sullivan.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor
Not the easiest thing to get an 84 year old re-elected, but in this scenario it’s Louise in a walk. A better title would actually be “don’t tell them they’re pissing on their own shoes and calling it rain.”
Petorado
In a post-Citizens United nation, it’s awfully optimistic of the Republican Party to think they’ll get their way by rejiggering the democratic parts of the process. It’s quite precious that they think that big dollar donors like the Kochs won’t get behind the nut bags, and that the sane part if their party will outnumber the crazies at the primary voting booth. Nice little monster they’ve created for themselves.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Schlemizel:
Old? I was in High School when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.
gvg
Actually I’m not sure that is a relevant example of their entire strategy. A district who went for Obama by that margin is probably hopeless for a republican so anybody GOP with sense probably refused to run there and only fools are wasting their time. What is the GOP doing in competitive districts? Otherwise you are telling me just what I want to hear and I will be surprised badly by actual election results please.
Schlemizel
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I’m only a couple years behind you then! It sure does not feel like 50 years ago . . . until I stand up after sitting for a while!
IowaOldLady
The thing is, they don’t pay for the craziness most of the time. Sure, they’ll have trouble winning the White House, but they’ll retain control of the House in 2014 and probably take the Senate. Not because more people agree with them, mind you. But because it’s a rigged game.
We have to keep fighting, of course, but we’re fighting up hill.
Amir Khalid
Garbage in, garbage out. The Republican party’s primary process is not the real problem here, its candidates are. The only people who volunteer to go through it plainly don’t have what it takes to do the President’s job. No selection process can pick a worthwhile nominee out of a field of such candidates.
Kay
We should probably be happy because I don’t think this approach ever works. Basically they’re saying they will limit the influence of their actual Party activists in the hope that there is another, more moderate group of activists who will then rise to the fore. They hope to Find The Real Republicans. At the same time, they plan to rely on local organizing instead of free and paid media.
Political parties aren’t theories, or aspirational goals “on the ground”. They’re a group of people. The composition of that group of people determines what a Real Republican is, not a pronouncement from on high.
Moderate Republicans here try the same thing with religious conservatives, and they’ve been trying, and failing, for years. They insist that the local Republican Party activist base can somehow be composed of 50% religious conservatives but not focus on abortion, gay marriage, etc.
If I mix up a drink that’s half ice tea and half lemonade, I can insist all I want that it’s REALLY ice tea, that the REAL part of the drink is ice tea. It’s still half lemonade, and it will taste like it’s half lemonade.
Hawes
“Teanderthals”?
Why have I not heard this before?
Of course, it’s not very nice to neanderthals, but…
MattF
@gvg: I think the question is what happens at the margin– Will a half-dozen small changes in the primary process make it harder for the kooks in a half-dozen places where there’s a real contest? The answer has to be ‘Where’s the beef?’ Where are the moderate, attractive candidates? I don’t see them.
Villago Delenda Est
Please proceed, Gauleiter Priebus.
Kay
We have a version of this playing out locally, in the board of elections. Somehow, a moderate Republican lawyer snuck onto the board of elections. He’s appealing to Democrats for help, because The Base are trying to oust him. Too much “book learning” seems to be the complaint. Not enough “commonsense” (you have to run that together, like Sarah Palin does-commonsense.)
Is he the Real Republican, or are they? Well, I don’t know. I could check the national platform, but I think they are if they succeed.
They didn’t limit the influence of the religious Right, here. They simply capitulated and then adopted all of their demands, which made the Real Republicans (as a composite group) more aligned with the religious Right. They’re doing the same thing with the Tea Party.
scav
@Kay:
Get’s even trickier if the lemonade actively and vocally despises and condemns the ice tea and the ice tea pretends the lemonade doesn’t exist on the bus while discreetly moving to a more genteel seat slight further away. Your refreshing summer drink is behaving like a vinaigrette if you’re lucky and a science fair volcano if your audience is.
Renie
In my paper today, my representative, Peter King (NY) is quote OUTRAGED unquote at the RNC resolution calling the National Security Agency’s surveillance “unconstitutional” as a disastrous sellout to his party’s isolationist wing. And the Republican Civil War continues….
danielx
Right.
I suppose it belabors the obvious to point out that the Republican base is comprised of wingnuts at this point, and the more a candidate brings teh crazy, the better they like it. The people who vote in Republican primaries want their candidates to be insane assholes, and they’d rather see a candidate go down in ideologically pure flames than see a candidate willing to compromise in any way whatsoever.
WereBear
In Rule and Ruin, a member of the moderate wing explained that the nutters have lots of passion and moderates, by their nature, have less.
Baud
I don’t see how a shorter primary season helps Republicans nominate a “real Republican.” If a yahoo tea partier gets early momentum, there’s less time for the establishment to react.
aimai
@Kay: Kay, I just love you. You have a fantastic, grounded, way with words.
Chyron HR
Why are you ordering poor Sean Hannity and Meghan McCain to leave New York?!
the Conster
The GOP “looked” crazy and unserious? Ambinder really doesn’t grasp that’s the look they were going for? What is it going to take? In the long ago words of beltane, do they have to be naked and rub feces on themselves before they’re not taken seriously, or would that be considered the new political normal too as long as some Democrat somewhere told someone to go eat shit?
Baud
@Kay:
Stop making me long for summer! Ice tea and lemonade indeed.
gf120581
@Baud: Good point. As bad as the endless debates were for the GOP overall, you can argue they were good for Romney because they allowed him to take down his opponents one by one or give them time to self-destruct on their own (most notably Rick Perry blanking on what Cabinet departments he’d eliminate).
A shorter primary season and fewer debates, however, can make it easier for an unelectable loon like Cruz or Paul to sneak in.
Kay
@scav:
We really did see this play out with the religious Right. The religious Right didn’t move at all of their position. The Real Republicans did. Now ALL Republicans espouse the religious Right agenda.
George HW Bush pushed access to birth control for poor women in the US House. That federal program is his accomplishment. The Tea Party House zeroed it out, and Mitt Romney joined the Tea Party and ran against it. The former governor of Massachusetts. The moderate. He completely capitulated on a 30 year old federal program that George HW Bush promoted.
I think I know who the Real Republicans are.
George HW Bush establishing a federal subsidy program for contraceptives to Mike Huckabee on contraceptives, over 30 years. I would say the religious Right completely trounced the purely aspirational theoretical “Republican Party”.
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud:
Yes, tactically, it seems counterproductive for the establishment to shorten the time they have to counter some Teahadi Joementum thing that could make the last couple of Presidential elections look like squeakers.
I think the real issue for the current GOP is one of tone, rather than substance. The problem is, a lot of voters out there are looking past the tone to the substance, and finding the substance every bit as repulsive as the tone.
So good luck with the kinder, gentler schtick. That is done and no one is forgetting it, which is one of the reasons why Jeb Bush has no chance at all. The brand has an indelible taint on it now.
scav
@Kay: There is the related problem that we can’t even be sure if everyone is invoking and searching for the same ‘real’ often unspotted in the wild republicans. If we did compo-sketches of the all and ran a virtual lineup, would they share a resemblance at all? Or would a bonobo be standing next to a silverback next to a orangoutang?
They’re rather like the ‘real’ ‘mercans that all politicians claim to speak for. The invisible bulky bit also probably suffer from the fact they don’t have strong opinions on a fair bit (but can parrot what seems to be widely accepted and safe) and don’t much wish to be bothered.
jheartney
the party has conspired to nominate the most electable conservative candidate
I thought that was what McCain and Romney were supposed to have been. Their problem is they don’t have one of these oxymoronic electable conservatives running, as far as I can see. This time it’s clowns all the way down.
WereBear
Arnold Palmer!
I don’t enjoy the country being dragged down with the Xantians, but the thought of the country club, genteel. Nixon fans being dragged down with them is a bit of a compensation.
Kay
@aimai:
Thanks.
I think it’s futile and weirdly cowardly. I ran into the same thing with the school bond election. To make walk lists one goes to the Bd of Elections site and uses the tools to narrow lists. I’m sitting there playing with it at my desk, The Moderates who are running this show are standing behind me, and I’m just curious, I’ve never worked with them before, so I pull the whole list. I eventually figure out they want me to exclude Republicans. They’re a little sheepish about this which is why it takes me twenty minutes to figure out what they’re saying.
It was hilarious. The strategy was to not tell the Republicans we’re raising taxes, and it was devised by the Republicans. It worked in that one election, we won by 400 votes, but they haven’t done anything to change the composition of the group of people who constitute the county Party. How long can that go on?
Villago Delenda Est
@jheartney:
One of the serious problems the GOP faces is that the primary process forces their “moderates” to be less so in order to be competitive with the rabble that constitutes the GOP base. THEN they have to slant left to be viable against the Dems in the general. It’s not working, and it doesn’t help that they come out and say that they’ll do it, as the etch-a-sketch comment made clear.
The GOP base may be fanatic, and embrace an incredibly stupid, counter-productive ideology, but they have gleaned that they’re being played by the GOP establishment. This only makes them less willing to tolerate any deviance from their ideological purity tests (see McCain, John) when it comes to actually being in power. I was going to say “governing” but it’s obvious that the GOP base doesn’t believe in that, because they want it all, and compromise to them is total sell-out.
coin operated
@Villago Delenda Est:
This. I’d love them to try that Compassionate Conservative tag again.
Gex
@Baud: And as I recall, early in the primaries in 2012 we had Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum, Gingrich, and who knows who else were the “winners” in the process. It took the entire long process of the insane idiots exposing themselves in the Republican primaries to get the base to finally give up and allow Mitt to be the nominee.
So they want to stop the process at the point where Bachmann would have been the candidate? How’s that supposed to help?
Cervantes
@coin operated:
Our boy Ted Cruz has been known to use that tag:
That’s from a Princeton alumni news-letter circa 2000. He was an advisor to the Bush campaign that year.
Grung_e_Gene
To be fair to Tea Partiers Obama does equal Hitler. I have a proof of this but can’t share it here for fear of the Obama NSA Dineshing me!
gene108
@Renie:
I do not think there’s much a of a Civil War in the Republican Party.
You have “Tea Party” types, who say what they think and “moderate” Republicans, who stay on the their group-tested-Luntz-approved message of the day.
They have very few actual policy differences. The only difference are what tactics work in getting the most Republicans elected; stay on the message of the day or tell folks what you really think.
This isn’t what the Democrats went through in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when different wings of the Democratic Party actually represented different policy positions and different constituencies vying for control of what the Democratic Party was going to stand for.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
Same as it ever was. William F. Buckley was just as anti-integration as the nuttiest John Bircher, but he said it in such a lovely upper-class accent.
Splitting Image
The GOP will move forward as soon as it publicly denounces televangelical Christians and makes it clear that they are not welcome in their party. Not before.
Yes, it means splitting the party and getting waxed once or twice at the Presidential level, but austerity is all about taking your medicine when you have to.
SiubhanDuinne
@Schlemizel:
Wow. I applied for a cultural producer job for “Sunday Morning” when it was still in the notional stages, before it even had an official name. At the time, the entire concept was remarkably refreshing — and at its best, the program has delivered on its early ideals and then some (although I haven’t watched it myself in several years). I got as far as one low-level interview at CBS, but didn’t advance — bad day at Black Rock, I guess. Hadn’t realized that was half a lifetime ago.
/damn, I’m even older
Fred
@Schlemizel: Missed the “Sunday Morning” debut but I caught Elvis and The Beatles. Saw Oswald get shot too. I even remember Edward R. Murrow.
Lord, I’m gettin’ old. Gettin’ old’s a bitch but it beats the alternative.
feebog
@Splitting Image:
Seriously? Get rid of the only organizations that really are, you know, organized? The Evangelicals make up a substantial percentage of their base. Not. Going. To. Happen.
Gex
@feebog: Which gets back to the GOP’s fundamental problem. The policies of the “real” Republicans do not appeal to a majority of voters. Hell, Teahadis hate big corporations just as much as DFHs do.
They’ve had to encode racism into the economic platform to get white working class people to support it. And that worked for only so long, then they needed to invite the evangelicals in.
Frankly, I can only assume that all the discussion about trying to get rid of the nut job candidates is just a PR smoke screen designed to try to win back some moderate voters while knowing full well they can’t jettison the people who make the party go. If these guys had any ideas of how to win without racists and culture warriors, they would have done so in the first place.
It’s kind of like the Pope saying “Let’s be nice to gays” while continuing to call us inherently disordered, fighting our civil rights, and being appalled at the idea of gay people adopting. There’s no real change happening.
Fred
I think the GOP is onto something. Give the crazy morons (candidates) less time to show off what loons they are. Less debates = less foot in mouth from the stoopids = less recent proof that the GOP are the Stoopid Party. Their best bet might be to hand pick some square jawwed pretty boy and don’t let him open his mouth until the inauguration.
note: “Don’t piss in my poket and tell me it’s raining”, is the way I always heard it. Something so evocative about that image, don’t you think?
Splitting Image
@feebog:
You can look at it as the Ground Zero of the “outsourcing looks good but has a dangerous payload down the line” problem that infests modern businesses. The GOP outsourced their voter outreach to organizations that have since become impossible for anyone else to work with and whose goals are now tarnishing the brand of the original company.
They either have to take their medicine and commit to bringing GOP voter outreach back in-house or let the brand collapse and try to start over.
FlyingToaster
@Gex:
Actually, it’s probably to try to keep the suburban white megachurch attendee voters showing up for the general election.
FlyingToaster
@Baud:
That isn’t actually the point.
Last election, the big moneybags backing presidential candidates — Frees, Adelson, Kochs, etc. — wasted a LOT of money on candidates that didn’t make it to the show.
They want a shorter season so that they don’t waste so much money. This is ALL about not making the 1% spend so much money on failure.
Dems and/or lefty SuperPACs need to go all in on oppo reasearch, because any of the nutbags in the field could win.
Baud
@FlyingToaster:
Maybe. But it seems that the new system will cause a lot of those same donors to put in a lot of money early to help put their preferred candidate in a position to win the sprint to the nomination. Anyway, even if the theory is sound, the GOP will find a way to muck it up.
coin operated
@Cervantes: I didn’t know that Mr. Cruz was trying to revive that line. Going to be interesting when people compare his government shutdown tactics over ACA to the fact that moderate Republican families are discovering the benefits of the ACA.
Kentucky being a prime example…wonder how Turtleman is going to deal with that come re-election…
Cervantes
@coin operated:
I don’t know that he is. I doubt it. I wish he would!
But as I said, the quoted words were spoken in 2000.
Jewish Steel
@Kay: @aimai:
I 2nd aimai’s praise. This especially:
Deftly put. Although if people accepted this it would eliminate 85% of what gets conjectured and argued about on the internet.
gene108
@coin operated:
The scary thing about Bush, Jr. is in 2000 he was the most conservative candidate to run for President in a long time. He ran on “compassionate conservatism” because the electorate did not want politicians to run on a platform of IGMFY.
Fast forward 12 years and Romney, the moderate, and his running mate Paul Ryan, basically ran on a platform of IGMFY and 45% of the country voted for them.
I think a good chunk of this country has lost its mind and the Republicans either tell them to seek help and lose a few elections or get sucked into the the craziness. The Republicans have chosen to give into the craziness.
A lot of folks think Obama’s election in 2008 sent Republicans over the edge. I think Democrats taking back the majority in Congress, in 2006, is what did it to Congressional Republicans (at least). Bush, Jr. wanted immigration reform. Congressional Republicans opposed him and killed it, despite Democrats also supporting it. Bush & Co. wanted to to something to stabilize the financial crisis, in the fall of 2008, but Congressional Republicans were happy to let the Democrats carry the water while the global economy burned.
I think the losses in 2006 pushed the professional Republicans over the edge, because that is when they really started to reject any attempt at doing anything other than an IGMFY policy. And it is when Republican politicians started rejecting the national platform of their party, as evidenced by their killing of their Party’s sitting President’s agenda, and going further and further towards right-wing crazy-land.
Compassionate Conservatism died, when Pelosi became Speaker of the House and Harry Reid became Senate Majority leader. That’s when Republicans started to move towards the current brand of scorched earth tactics.
*************************************************
Bush and Co., I hope, were the last bunch of merry crooks the Republicans can produce at the national level. The state level crooks – Christie, Walker, Scott, Corbett, etc. – have either proven to be bush league in their ability to be corrupt and not get caught or are highly unpopular and have met some strong push back.
gene108
@Gex:
They do not “hate” big corporations the same way DFH’s do. DFH’s have a fundamental dislike of the profit motive. Teabaggers “hate” big corporations only so far as those big corporations do not fit their world view of America as a Christian nation, whose founders were handed the Constitution and Bill of Rights (especially the 2nd Amendment) by Jesus.
Lee Russell
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I was 8.
My mother woke me up, put me in front of the B&W and said”Watch this. It’s gonna be important.”
She was always right.