SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010
KLMNO Sunday OPINION DANA MILBANK
establishment? T
Republican
he Republican establishment, we are told, has suffered quite a beating at the hands of a 41-year-old Delaware woman by the name of Christine O’Donnell. The Time magazine cover says the Tea
Party’s “conservative rebels are rattling the Republican establishment.” ABC News says the Tea Party landed “a huge blow to the GOP establishment,” and CNN says it sent “shockwaves to the Republican establish- ment.” George W. Bush ad man Mark McKinnon tells USA Today “there is now a civil war within the Republican Party,” pit- ting the Tea Party against “the Republican establishment.”
Similar claims had been made earlier about the Tea Party bucking, beating, strik- ing, shocking and delivering blow after blow to the establishment in New York, Florida, Colorado, Alaska, Kentucky and elsewhere. Sorry to interrupt the anti-establishment violence, but could we pause long enough to ask a question: What is this “Republican es- tablishment” of which you speak? Though it has become a stock storyline to describe besieged party bosses, those ped- dling this account have largely created a straw man. The Republican establishment of popular imagination, like the George- town salon, no longer exists. If there is a Re- publican establishment, the Tea Party is it. The “civil war” McKinnon and others de- scribe implies that party leaders are fighting back. Instead, they’re stepping out in front of the Tea Party parade and pretending to be drum majors.
Who in the supposed Republican estab- lishment has opposed the Tea Party? Not Republican National Committee
Chairman Michael Steele. “If I weren’t chair of the RNC, I’d be out there in the Tea Party movement,” he told Greta van Susteren. Not House Republican leader John Boeh-
ner. “There really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the Tea Party activists believe in,” he told radio host Mike Gallagher. Not Senate Republican leader Mitch
McConnell. Since his favored candidate lost the Kentucky Senate primary to the Tea Par- ty’s Rand Paul, McConnell has routinely hurled around Tea Party terms such as “gov- ernment takeover” and has reveled in block- ing President Obama’s agenda. “I wish we had been able to obstruct more,” he said. Not National Republican Senatorial Com-
mittee Chairman John Cornyn. The Texas senator, swallowing earlier misgivings, just sent O’Donnell a check from the party for $42,000. Not even Karl Rove. After O’Donnell’s vic-
tory, George W. Bush’s “brain” declared on Fox News that “this is not a race we’re going to be able to win,” citing the “nutty things” she has said. (The nominee has claimed, among other things, that there are mice with human brains.) But after hearing com- plaints from Tea Party types such as Sarah Palin, Rove returned to Fox News to say that O’Donnell is “not out of the game” and that he was “one of the first” to endorse her. The vast majority of GOP lawmakers al- ready display the conservative purity that the Tea Partyers have been demanding. Ful- ly 86 percent of Republicans in the House and Senate were dubbed “ACU Conserva- tives” by the American Conservative Union, for voting the conservative line at least 80 percent of the time in 2009. To check on the state of the Republican establishment, I paid a visit to RNC head- quarters. The RNC building, with photos ev- erywhere of Dwight Eisenhower, is the es- tablishment’s inner sanctum. This week, it played host to the self-styled “Young Guns” of the party. House minority whip Eric Cantor and two other high-ranking House Republicans, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, just pub- lished a book by that name and held a news conference at the RNC to promote their work. The three men, in their 40s, aren’t ex- actly “young,” and among those listed in the book as Young Guns are two 79-year-old lawmakers and a 76-year-old. But that didn’t stop them from presenting themselves as “a new generation of conservative leaders” who — no accident — sound just like Tea Party activists. The book celebrates “angry citizens con- fronting often dazed and defensive mem- bers of Congress” and the “concerned citi- zens who converged on the Capitol” in loud protest. The authors denounce Obama and his kind as “redistributors of wealth” trying to “take us past the tipping point” toward a “social welfare state” where “government [is] so large and the debt so big it will be im- possible to reverse it.” “It’s the No. 1 political book on Kindle! It’s
26th overall on Amazon!” McCarthy told re- porters. “It’s unbelievable.” Unbelievable? No. All it took was turning themselves into Tea Partyers.
danamilbank@washpost.com NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES ROBERT SHRUM
Democratic strategist and senior fellow at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service
The Tea Party will prove to be the best thing
that’s happened to Barack Obama and the Democrats since, well, Sarah Palin, the media-hyped 2008 vice presidential nominee who turned out to be a bursting bubble, not a lasting bounce, for the McCain campaign. It’s fitting that Palin is now the godmother of a movement that has captured the GOP instead of being captured by it. A series of tea-steeped intra-party fratricides has produced unwanted and unabashedly extreme candidates who will kill the Republicans’ best hopes for 2010. Democrats will now lose fewer seats; they’ll keep the Senate — and just maybe even the House. The president won’t have to struggle with the harshest consequences of a wholesale hostile takeover in Congress. But that’s only a down payment on the tea dividend for Democrats. The big dividend will come in 2012. Mitt Romney, the best candidate to challenge Obama if the recovery lags, is guilty of a heresy the Tea Party dogmatists won’t abide: He cooperated with Ted Kennedy to pass health reform in Massachusetts. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, the other favorite of party pros, pronounced the self-evident truth that true believers dare not speak — tax increases may be necessary. That leaves the unelectables — Palin, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Mississippi Gov.Haley Barbour, the longtime uber-lobbyist who would be president at a time of deep hostility towardWashington insiders. But for the Tea Party battalions who will dominate the 2012 primaries and caucuses, he may pass muster as uber-conservative on the hot-button issues. As they have just shown so conspicuously in
Delaware, these purists don’t care about electability. They may sift through other potential nominees, but their political strainer is finely meshed, and whoever prevails will be pushed far to the right.
ED ROGERS
Chairman of BGR Group; White House staffer to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush
The Democrats and some of their media elite allies seem to believe that the Tea Party’s rise has diminished Republican prospects in the midterm elections this fall. In fact, the Tea Party is a big problem for President Obama and his party this year and probably through 2012. Think of the Tea Partyers as the tip of an
iceberg. The visible part. The one we see on cable
news channels is only the thin, visible slice of the opposition. The much larger, submerged part is the roughly two-thirds of the electorate who think America is headed in the wrong direction, disapprove of Congress and believe the president is handling the economy poorly. The Democrats are about to hit the whole iceberg. After the November elections, however, many Republican leaders will be intimidated by the Tea Party’s success and will worry about the challenge its candidates could present in the Republican primaries in 2012. The result: GOP elected officials will not want to be accused of compromising with Obama on anything. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got religion and saved himself; Gov. Charlie Crist (I-Fla.) got run out of the party; and Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) and Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) had their careers abruptly ended. Obama, in turn, will have to pander to his base, making governing all but impossible. This will further enrage the Tea Party and discourage critical swing voters. Since they will still hold the White House after November and can be blamed for gridlock, the Democrats have more of a long-term problem than they would like to admit.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY TOWNSEND Lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003
President Obama can take solace from the fact
that even Karl Rove complains about Delaware’s Tea Party candidate. The colorful nuttiness of those whom that party has nominated changes the midterm elections from a straight referendum on a president presiding over a near-10 percent unemployment rate to a Rorschach test on who we are and who speaks for us. Do we want a senator who checks the bushes for hidden enemies or who proposes that Social Security be dismantled? Even tough economic times will not distort our fundamental values. The Tea Party looks for an enemy, and it is itself. So the Tea Party may help the president not only in this election but, most interestingly, with policy. By constantly raising the issue of the long-term deficit, it is forcing a discussion on how we pay for programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which take up a large part of the federal budget. During the Bush years, these questions went unanswered. A drug benefit was given without paying for it. In fact, taxes were cut, creating a $1.3 trillion hole. Because the true believers in the Tea Party say that they would eliminate Social Security and
Medicare to shrink government spending, the president’s proposals will seem reasonable by contrast. It is hard for a president to change policy without a clear understanding of the trade-offs involved — cutting benefits, raising taxes, upping the retirement age and so forth. The Tea Party will provide the president precisely the opening he needs.
DAN SCHNUR Director of the University of Southern California’s Unruh Institute of Politics; communications director for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign
The majority party in a bad economy needs to
make this campaign into a choice, which requires a foil. Two years later, vilifying George W. Bush now
draws diminishing returns for Democratic candidates. Simultaneously promoting and demonizing John Boehner will be difficult, as Republicans who tried to do that with another House minority leader in 2006 will tell you. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are too far from the levers of government to make credible targets. The Tea Party might help with this, but only a bit. While the national reputation of the Tea Party movement does not appear to strongly affect swing voters in one direction or another, and while the broader political and economic trends work strongly against the party in power, the individual eccentricities of insurgent Republican candidates could provide opportunities for the Democrats to pick off a few seats here and there. The core tenet of the Obama campaign message in 2008 was that change was something to hope for. Two years later, intensified by the influx of Tea Party candidates into the general election cycle, the president’s allies now argue that change is something to fear. The logical underpinnings of that messaging adjustment make perfect sense (changing the good change is bad change, or something like that). But along with the vulnerabilities that some Republican nominees bring to the table, they also bring an immeasurable amount of grass-roots and populist energy, the kind that Candidate Obama leveraged so effectively, and for which President Obama still searches. Until the Democrats can find a way to approximate the motivation that their base provided two years ago, the next several weeks will still be a decidedly uphill struggle.
TOPIC A ONLINE: Democratic political commentator Donna Brazile.
Andrew Alexander is away. The Ombudsman column will resume when he returns. OMBUDSMAN ANDREW ALEXANDER
What
day Americans who have been struggling to get Washington’s attention.
C
On Sept. 12, 2009, millions of citizens rallied across the country. They gathered in the nation’s capital and other cities to convey a clear message: You work for us; we don’t work for you. Stop the bailouts, the takeovers, the debt and dependence. For years, conservatives have been told that the only way to create a big-tent party was to support big-government candidates who were “electable,” rather than principled. History suggests other- wise. Majorities are built on principles, not the other way around. When that big tent came to Washington last September, everyone in it was yelling that they wanted less government, not more. Democrats mocked these voters and tuned them out, but liberty-minded Republican candidates tuned them in. As a result, races that were once consid- ered unwinnable have flipped from “safe Demo- crat” to “lean Republican” this election cycle. Thanks to the grass roots, Republicans have a
slate of candidates who believe in constitutional, limited government. We will balance the budget, repeal the unconstitutional health-care takeover, create a predictable tax and regulatory environ- ment in which businesses can create jobs, and re- store a sense of fairness to the economy. This plat- form stands in stark contrast to the Democrats’ re- cord. They have racked up trillions in debt on bad legislative bets, picking winners and losers in al- most every major market sector. Their policies cre- ated turmoil and uncertainty, not prosperity. In 2006 and 2008, bailouts, bipartisan support for earmarks and big spending bills no one had read
Washington can hear you now by Jim DeMint
hristine O’Donnell’s win on Tuesday may have shocked establishment politicians and the media, but it was no surprise for every-
blurred the lines between the Republicans and Dem- ocrats. But after Barack Obama was elected presi- dent, Washington’s economic policies went from bad to worse. In a short time the Obama White House and the Pelosi-Reid Congress have made clear that they intend to push America to the left of Europe. Americans quickly realized that if this country
was going to survive, they needed to elect people who would respect, not ignore, the limits of gov- ernment prescribed by the Constitution. I vowed to do all I could to help. The Senate Conservatives Fund, which I chair, was designed to do just that. I knew in my heart that the Republican Party could save this country if it could recruit more members to stand up for the principles of freedom.
Thanks to the grass roots, Republicans have candidates who believe in constitutional, limited government.
It took a rough-and-tumble primary cycle to
find enough people willing do it. Now it’s time to give the Democrats a heartbreaker election in No- vember. Obama’s honeymoon is over. None of his so- called legislative achievements lives up to its label. The trillion-dollar stimulus plan produced mas- sive debt but few jobs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act hasn’t made health care af- fordable. Instead, health insurance rates are rising. And the financial reform bill didn’t touch Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae — the government-controlled culprits of the financial meltdown that have tallied hundreds of billions in losses for taxpayers. All of these programs were built on the flawed idea that the government, not the free market, could fix the economy. Democrats and their allies
thought these programs would be so popular they would seal their lock on Washington for years to come. But Republicans who dared to challenge the policies are ahead in the polls. Now the Senate’s most powerful Democrat is neck and neck with conservative Sharron Angle. In- cumbent senators in the reliably Democratic states of Washington and Wisconsin are struggling to compete with common-sense candidates Dino Rossi and Ron Johnson, respectively. Folks such as Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania and Marco Rubio in Flori- da are headed to victory because they stood with the people against career politicians. This is happening across the country, from Alaska to Delaware. These men and women are coming to Washing- ton to join the fight, not the club. Their principles are clear: free-enterprise economics, limited gov- ernment and individual liberty. These views are based on 200 years of American history and writ- ten into our founding documents. Democrats have desperately called these new leaders “radical,” but Americans know what “radi- cal” means after watching the Democrats run Washington. Creating an entitlement program while the na- tion is $13 trillion in debt is radical. So is raising taxes while millions of Americans struggle to pay bills and find work. So is taking over the banks, au- to companies, mortgage companies, the health- care system and the financial sector. Americans have rallied against out-of-control
government for two years. “Can you hear me now?” they yelled. Thankfully, a crop of common-sense conservative Republican candidates listened. I’m praying for an earthquake election in No- vember that will shake Washington to its core. I’m doing all I can to make it happen. And everyone who has been working toward this goal can be sure: All of Washington can hear you now.
The writer is a Republican senator from South Carolina. TOPIC A Will the Tea Party help or hurt Obama?
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