Saturday Coffee--Not Tea--Thoughts on the Week

Neal Gabler in "The Extreme Republican Party" posted on the Boston Globe's blog writes that we have now gone past the time when we can pretend to have two serious political parties in this country--one right of center and one left of center. Both political parties are compromised and corrupted by their ties to Big Money, as witnessed to the nearly $1 billion being poured into the health reform debate; but one political party has gone nuts. In a recent Pew poll, only 23 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans. When I ran the International Republican Institute, Republicans for the first time in my lifetime had achieved a slight plurality over the Democrats with some 45% identification. From a practical political point of view, the current number means you must secure another 28% of the electorate to win--in other words the votes you must ween away from independents and Democrats is more than your entire base. We're almost at the point where Republicans might consider dumping its base to have viability in the future.

The current Republican base is so out of touch with average Americans--the charge they levelled for years at Democrats--that a majority of its members either believe or aren't sure President Obama was born in kenya, believe the House health care bill calls for death panels to euthanize senior citizens, and believe that Obama is responsible for our economic woes (61%!)
How wacked out are the current Republicans? 71% of all Americans believe that global warming is a result of human activity, only 27% of Republicans; while Rasmussen says 55% of all Americans oppose health care reform ( recent polls counter this), 87% of Republicans oppose it and 74% very strongly. Depending on the poll, President Obama's favorability rating is between 50 to 58% but fewer than 10% of Republicans approve.

But this situation gets worse. Only 41 percent of conservatives now identify themselves as Republicans--that's how extreme the Party has become. The recent embrace of birthers, deathers, tenthers, vaxers and liars not only damages the Republicans future chances but seriously blocks the ability of there to be a real political debate in this country. Among the remaining Republicans I know,this paranoid politics also becomes a groupthink. Those not subscribing to the latest lunacy are considered Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) and are not to be trusted. The Republican embrace of the Tea Party nonsense and the Glenn Beck 9-12 project now plunge them into the treacherous waters of insurrectionists, secessionists, white supremacists and theocrats. This is not only dangerous to the country, President Obama personally but also to the Republicans themselves.

The effects of this have been dramatic. Governor Pawlenty, for instance, has announced the desire to embrace the lunacy of Gov. Perry of Texas in saying that the invocation of the tenth amendment might be a way for states to stop health care reform. This is a man who honestly has aspirations for the Presidency. And he would be representing the Party of Abraham Lincoln! The tenth amendment movement is of interest to constitutional scholars only because the doctrine of nullification, which existed prior to the Civil War, has been seriously rebuffed through countless Supreme Court rulings, including one as recently as 2005 and to see people raise this is a red flag to profound historical ignorance. For their part, neo-conservatives, who once pretended to have intellectual interests, have solicited the support of former half-term Governor Sarah Palin to press their support for President Obama's Afghanistan build-up. This is a person married--at least for now--to a former secessionist and who actively accused the President of paling around with terrorists. And somehow she's supposed to have any credibility and importance?

As I wrote in my thoughts on Republican Gomorrah, the control of the Republican Party by the religious right is pernicious enough. Now Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council believe they have a second-wind in organizing the religious opposition to health care reform. Not only are Republicans lying about the facts of bills but the religious community is bearing false witness against the bill as funding abortions, providing illegal immigrants health care, and creating death panels to euthanize senior citizens. The phenomenon of self-proclaimed Christians opposing in the name of religion, not politics, health care reform is mind-boogling. As I have written elsewhere, this is a wicked brew.

The first casualty in war is truth. But for our political system it is vital that we have reality-based debates. We should have learned through a series of policy blunders on both sides that the cold shower of fact-based analysis can lead to a more sober and worthwhile policy debate. The problem of a major political party embracing paranoid politics is that you can have no real compromise if one side lives in a a parallel universe.

Today's Teabag Express demonstrations in Washington raise serious challenges to the legitimacy of the Republican Party, not President Obama. What is it that these people are really advocating? It appears to be a grab-bag of nutty things from tax hikes (even though everyone I know got a tax cut), deficits (ignoring the Republican history of this issue), gun rights (so far Eric Holder has made not a single move in this direction),national service day on 9-11, health care reform, states rights, anti-immigration, upholding the constitution ( why not protest against Dick Cheney?), against cap-and-trade legislation, against the stimulus package, against the bailout of the banks, against support for the auto industry, against ACORN, and against abortion, the grandmother of the cultural wars. This bears alot of similarity to past nativist movements in our history that ranged from the Know-Nothings to the KKK. And, I might add it is profoundly anti-American in ways that the democratic Left never was. To actively target a sitting President only eight months into his term with the purpose of crippling his administration is the height of anti-patriotism.

Astonishingly, the vast majority of the teabaggers appear to be senior citizens--who are on social security, medicare and military pensions--and yet they advocate smaller government and the cut of government programs to help others than themselves. This is a classic generational war by seniors on the rest of society. I'm not sure they are self-conscious about this. Their mantra--"Taking Our America Back"--should disturb people who want to move forward. The last time America seemed normal to these people, and we lived in a segregated world where Ossie and Harriet were parents was under Dwight David Eisenhower, a man the ancestors of the teabaggers hated as a closet Democrat, crypto-Communist and a liberal.

The one aspect that fascinates me about this is the deliberate adoption of what they perceive as the tactics of the Left. Overtly, they are fascinated by Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayres and the Weatherman Underground. We all know they were miserable failures and that no one was persuaded by domestic terrorism--as we also found out with Timothy McVeigh--or even, alas, massive demonstrations. The anti-Iraq war demonstrations often exceeded one million people and their effectiveness was negligible. What the democratic Left discovered was that they had to organize and deal with the real problems of average citizens to have any credibility and legitimacy. The jury is still out on astro-turf protesting, turning out citizens on the corporate dime. It may well be--and I believe this--fantastic for corporate interests but of marginal use for generating real, civil debate.

Alot of commentators of the Left raise the whole issue of race. With the face of the Republican party being almost exclusively white men from the South, who personally have long ties to racist groups, this is entirely legitimate. The Republican Party, starting with Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy with rhetoric provided by then speechwriter Pat Buchanan, has exploited racial animosity when it suits it. However, whole sectors of the party were both liberal and progressive on civil rights legislation but they have been wiped out with the demise of the party of the Northeast and Midwest. As I've also written, today's Republicans are banking on short-term gains in 2010 by mobilizing the white anti-Obama vote by playing the race card. How this can benefit the party in the long-run is anyone's guess.

There are no national Republican leaders with the stature or clout to distance the party from the lunatic core, which seems to be their base. I would suggest that the Teabaggers and the Glenn Beck followers are heavily dominated by small splinter parties such as Alan Keyes American Independence Party (old George Wallace's party),the Libertarians, now the LaRoucheites (who are nominally Democrats), White supremacists and neo-fascist groups. It could be one of the most embarrassing baits-and-switches in American political history. This hodgepodge of parties and grouplets has learned more mainstream language and become what Republicans believe are the real base of the party. There was some of this before but the moment when this became a reality was the nomination of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate. A choice to appease the religious right, she brought with it libertarian, secessionist, and pro-militia followers.

The e-mails I receive invoke the American Revolution, an event my ancestors proudly participated in. And we should all remember it's first casualty was an African-American named Crispus Attucks. The extreme gun rights crowd, which is linked to the militias and paramilitary groups, invokes the Second Amendment as the paramount result of the revolution. Allegedly they argue our founding fathers believed a well-armed populace would be check on oppressive government. Well, not so fast. The post-revolutionary America faced a challenge from the Shays Rebellion in Western Massachusetts and when the constitution was ratified our revolutionary founders discovered that a government needed a well-organized militia--in order to suppress insurrections. The Second Amendment cuts both ways but customary beliefs have the left gun rights people the dominent interpretation.

So what colonial master am I supposed to rebel against?--foreign-owned banks and corporations looks like a good start, But that's not what my colleagues have in mind. They stated that our political rights and civil liberties are today threatened more than at any time since the American Revolution. Oh, Really? More than the Civil War? More than the Palmer Era? More than WWII? More than during the Cold War? More than under the Bush-Cheney Administration?

No, our freedoms are threatened by the new Emperor Jones in the White House and his coterie of socialists like--I guess--Ben Bernacke, Rahm Emmanuel,Bob Gates, Kathleen Sebelius, Larry Summers and David Geitner. Here, my friends lose me completely. My problems with the Obama Administration have to do with the maintenance of some of the Bush era restrictions on civil liberties, not any new abuses of constitutional power. And, there is an awesome and deliberate ignorance of these Teabaggers that doesn't realize the U.S. Government represents 30% of our national economy and President Obama has not done all this by himself in eight months.

Can you imagine any of these people who aligned themselves with the Tea Baggers being able to manage the complexities of the world's largest economy and the largest component in that economy? That's the stakes in getting two political parties back to a place where policies can be rationally debated.

I'm usually snarky in my replies. If Obama has achieved all this in eight months, created a socialist America and torn up the Constitution, then we were left with a pretty weak nation when he took over and there's nothing that can be done to reverse it.

One hoped that after President Obama's health care speech and his paramount reasonableness we would have heard some responsible Republican commentary. Instead, the almost universal response was to double-down on the deliberate lying about the president's proposals. This has provoked condemnation of Obama from the Left for maintaining the fiction that any bipartisanship is possible.

At least in the House, they are absolutely right. The President's plan will receive no Republican votes in the House because the leadership is listening to Newt Gingrich's advice that 1994 will repeat itself. In the Senate, Voinovich, Snowe and Collins are the only likely candidates for support for Health Care Reform. Voinovich because he's retiring. The Maine Senators because Collins won in 2008 and Olympia Snowe doesn't face re-election until 2012. And also they represent the last of the Northeast Republicans, who take commonsense positions.

How vile has this become? Former First Lady Laura Bush, a librarian by trade and someone who like her mother-in-law is devoted to reading, supported President Obama's school speech and condemned the partisan attacks on it. For this mild call to civility, conservative blogs attacked her, recalling her past history as a non-active Democrat before she met George W. and went on to attack the most conservative President in my lifetime as a RINO. In the crowd of teabaggers who arrived in Washington for today's festivities, many condemned George W. Bush's domestic policies and his deficit-spending. They called for a true conservative to be President.

But their means appear to be at odds with their goals. It's not the American revolution that is there real model it's the French Revolution. The Republican Base has become the latest version of the Jacobins and we know where that went. The present situation is very dangerous. Leftwing writer Naomi Wolf in The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot wrote movingly of how important it was to keep the Idea of America alive for us and the rest of the world. Whatever imperfections exist in our struggle toward a more perfect union, the idea of America has and continues to inspire the rest of the world. Today, the very idea is being threatened by the parnoid politics that have taken over the Republican Party.