There’s quite a war being waged within the Grand Old Party these days, and it is hard to see how anyone will emerge a winner.
On one side are entrenched incumbents and the party’s congressional leadership, along with numerous professional political operatives and certain longstanding conservative media. Their internecine opponents call them “the establishment,” an intriguing term of derision for conservatives, and damn them as elitists, accommodationists, insufficiently faithful to the Republican gospel, and worse yet, responsible for the debacle of the last presidential election. On the other side are the true blue, grassroots, sons-of-the-soil conservatives out there in the heartland, who are easily portrayed by their opponents as ideologically hopped-up rubes who scared away the respectable suburbanite voters and thus blew the last presidential election.
This unsightly conflict has been has on stark display the past week due to two news stories that received wide play. One was the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention, a sort of Comic-Con for right wingers that somehow garners an extraordinary amount of attention, where speaker after speaker lambasted the “consultants” for their timidity and ineptitude. The other was an “autopsy” on the past election offered by the Republican National Committee, which urged that the party adopt a less strident tone and adopt a few reforms that might curb the influence of the more bellicose activists. Both stories provoked predictably vituperative responses from either side, with much-maligned Bush administration mastermind Karl Rove taking to the airwaves to mock former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and almost all of the talk radio hosts reacting with similar disdain to the RNC report.
Such squabbling could be considered a sign of the party’s health, perhaps, and we’d hate to see the Republicans so unthinkingly unified that they accept any deviation from principle as willingly as the Democrats do with drone wars and cronyism and lavish living and any number of Obama’s other heresies. Still, one would hope that the disagreements could be resolved with more civility than has lately been evident.
Although our sympathies naturally lie with the rubes, we do not regard the party accommodationist, elitist, out-of-touch losers as our enemies or their arguments as entirely without merit. The CPAC speakers were correct to note the crucial role that Tea Party enthusiasm played in 2010 mid-term elections, as well as how the lack of it played a crucial role in the 2010 presidential election, but Rove and other scapegoats are correct to note that an excess of Tea Party enthusiasm has cost the part eminently winnable Senate seats in Nevada, Delaware, and Missouri. The RNC’s recommendation that the party embrace some unspecified sort of immigration reform raises understandable suspicions, but its suggestion that the party make an effort note to come off as a bunch of Mexican-hatin’ bigots deserves some consideration. A series of super-primaries touted by the RNC report would indeed provide an advantage to the sort of well-heeled and media-recognized candidates favored by the party professionals, as a conservative base hoping for an out-of–nowhere hero complains, but it would also lessen the disastrous effects of a prolonged intra-party blitz of negative advertising.
These arguments are not nearly so clear-cut as those between the Republicans and a Democratic party that seems intent on spending the country into a financial calamity, and they all deserve a calm and respectful deliberation.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 