Washingtonpost.com:

From Kathleen Parker

… Republicans hope to hold the House and gain the Senate — and Democrats intend to hold the Senate and recover the House.

Each respective goal is equally possible depending on the same single significant determinant: whether Ted Cruz stops talking.

While that thought settles in, we pause to note that, right now, the idea that Republicans could convince anyone that they should be allowed to deliver milk, much less hold the nation’s purse strings, seems remote. But things do change quickly around here. With the debt crisis postponed and the government up and running again — faith in the efficiency of which underscores the direness of our political straits — most Americans will settle into the season’s serial holiday distractions and move right along.

What lies ahead is the GOP’s internal struggle to determine which wing of the party prevails. And which wing prevails likely will determine the balance of power come 2014. Suffice to say, if Cruz’s voice drowns out the so-called establishment voices, Republicans may as well start investing in camels. The desert awaits.

Ted Cruz is just one little big-mouth.   How can a freshman senator from Texas with little experience anywhere be as influential as he has been?  How could David Koresh  have been influential?  How could  Jim Jones convince hundreds of people to drink poisoned Kool Aid?  It makes no sense to me.  Are there people who simply have a Pied Piper type of personality?

Jones and Koresh both addressed spiritual matters.  Their respective  followers , at least in the beginning, had whatever spiritual needs they had satisfied.  Both the Branch Davidians and the Peoples Temple have been declared cults.

Cruz is different.  I don’t believe he is appealing to those with spiritual needs, necessarily.  So the question still remains, what needs does Cruz appeal to?  He tells his followers that defaulting on the debt ceiling won’t be so bad and that shutting down the government is a worthy cause to achieve one’s political goals.  His clarion call  appeals to a cadre of followers, small when compared to the general electorate, but large when considering numbers of followers.    Polls told us last week that the tea party had a 21% approval rating and from all appearances, Cruz is the face of the tea party.  Republicans need to make sure he doesn’t become the face of the GOP.

Cruz and his followers seem to be trying to wrestle the Republican brand away from the establishment GOP or what is left of it.  Not much is left of it after the 2012 summer of laughs as republicans had a candidate of the week to entertain us all summer.  I am sure that the establishment winced every time Michele Bachmann shrieked her evangelical made-up doom and gloom or Herman Cane intrigued us with his Nine-Nine-Nine plan.  Then there was Gov. Perry, another Texan who lost his way in the middle of a debate, Newt Gingrich who tried to be the grown up in the room, and Rick Santorum with his over-dose of fundamental Catholicism.

Those candidates weren’t  mainstream.  Gingrich came close but the old family values thing caught up with him.  It takes mainstream people with mainstream ideas to win a general election.  Outliers don’t create majorities.  It’s really a math question.   Mitt Romney would have been a great candidate if he had just been himself instead an amalgamation of the crew from the Summer of Laughs.  Somewhere he got caught up between overly gentrified snobbery and trying to be a born-again tea-partier.  It just didn’t work.

If the Republican Party continues to listen to Ted Cruz, it will be headed to the old elephant bone graveyard.  It doesn’t have to happen.  At some point, people will long for the old days when opposing parties duke it out during the day and go have a drink together after the close of business.   Common ground is a lot easier to find  eye  ball to eye ball.   That’s when real progress happens.  Both parties need each other to offset the general stupidity that both tend to lean towards.

 

31 Thoughts to “The GOP: old elephant graveyard or arise from the ashes?”

  1. Steve Randolphva

    “I don’t make jokes. I just watch government
    and report the facts.”

    Will Rogers

  2. punchak

    Not to mention how people went gaga over Sarah Palin!

  3. Andyh

    The real problem for the GOP is quickly becoming that moderate republicans have seen enough and are finding other things to do with their time.

    Does that cede the field to the extreme elements of the party? yes. However, when your options are to debate some maniac who believes default on our national debt is a viable strategy or go home and run your business (or whatever it is you do), the calculus gets a little easier every year.

    1. Oh totally agree with you, Andy. I think more and more moderate Republicans feel that way and are acting on it.

      I am tired of seeing really dedicated office-holders and seekers being run off by idiots and idiot bloggers who create fiction to replace solid fact. Most people just don’t have the time or energy to deal with the insanity.

      As a voter, when the choice is raving maniac or Democrat, the choice becomes easy. It makes the issues disappear. That really isn’t a good thing either.

      I think that ‘plays well with others’ and ‘rational’ might have to take the place of a lot of things I used to think were important.

      Sometimes ceding to the down and dirty pays off. They always end up getting too puffed up and shooting themselves in the foot. Once they turn down the volume, everyone sees that the emperor has no clothes and votes them out of office. The problem is, it takes too long.

  4. Starryflights

    Cruz’s crusade was crushed in the cradle. His bid to defund the Affordable Care Act was an epic failure but did appeal to the fringe freaks of the GOP.

  5. Kelly_3406

    So now you are comparing Ted Cruz to David Koresh and Jim Jones. Really? That hardly qualifies as civil political discourse plus your conclusions are ahistorical at best. Previous radicals like Tip O’Neil, Robert Byrd, and Howard Baker tried to use shutdowns to force changes to non-budgetary legislation. The debt is nearly unmanageable and Obamacare will only make it worse (regardless of what OMB claims).

    1. Actually, I believe I said there was a difference.

      But if you want to think I was comparing them, that’s fine too. I don’t think I was being uncivilized in my OPINION piece. Are you suggesting that the blog owners shouldn’t have opinions now? I may have said things you didn’t like to read but I don’t think what I wrote constituted uncivilized political discourse.

      I don’t believe I commented on ‘Obamacare.’ I think some of you have beaten it to death carrying on about the unknown and whining about forcing people to be insured. There are a few spots of vulnerability that someone could drive a tractor trailer threw…and what do I hear….crickets.

  6. Rick Bentley

    The GOP made a deal with the devil when they exploited race through the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s. The “chicken is coming home to roost”.

    Despite the inherently conservative nature of the American people, due to the GOP’s persistent image as the party of white men who want to tell women how to live, there won’t be a Republican President any time soon. Chris Christie could maybe give it a good run, but he won’t get the nomination. No one electable could get the GOP nomination in the current political climate.

    1. Rick said:

      No one electable could get the GOP nomination in the current political climate

      That pretty much says it all. Not all, but too many. And the OWM syndrome has been gradual.

      I saw it actually kick in big time around the time of Jimmy Carter.

      .

  7. Wolverine

    Wow! “one little big-mouth” — followed by Ted Kruz, David Koresh, and Jim Jones in the same little attack paragraph. Kruz has verified something very useful for the future: you can get this opposition way off track and into the spitting and mud throwing stage. Excellent. An opposition preoccupied with rage and off its operational balance. Disruption, then defeat. Hah! Even the C-in-C at 1600 Pennysylvania has fallen into the schoolyard taunt mode and shown his crude side.

    Vinceremo.

    1. Think you want. Perhaps he does have a cult. So who is spitting and mud throwing today other than you coming on this blog loaded for bear?

      Did you see my remarks about sexist remarks?

    2. The one little big-mouth led a whole bunch of people down a rabbit hole that had no exit. The one little big-mouth also cost the American tax payers an unnecessary $24 BILLION dollars to watch some folks act out a temper tantrum over settled law. The one little big-mouth has garnered the distain of many people in his party, not to mention those not in his party.

      Wolverine your outrage and aggressiveness sound like a last gasp to me. Obviously the 21% approval ratings in poll after poll speaks volumes. Should we expect to see another Fort Sumter? That national monument site was closed also, was it not?

  8. Wolverine

    And the Dem’s persistent image as the party of liberals who want the central government to tell everyone how to live every day all day long. Now excuse me, Mr. Bentley, while I go use my state-dictated toilet.

  9. punchak

    @Wolverine
    Vinceramo – my foot!

    Maybe it’s a typo but FWI, Ted’s last name is Cruz!

  10. Is it just me or did I see someone puffing up and attempting to bully?

    Shrug. Meanwhile, back to rational conversation.

  11. How could David Koresh have been influential? How could Jim Jones convince hundreds of people to drink poisoned Kool Aid?

    Funny…that paragraph made me think about Clinton and Obama. Now THERE’S some smooth talkers, convincing people that they actually care.

    1. Your response does not surprise me.

      Is that part of the job description? They have to care? Care about what? My feelings? Your feelings?

      What president has really cared and how so?

      Were you better off before or after Clinton, if you are honest with yourself?

  12. Starryflights

    Cruz did more for democrats than they could have ever done for themselves

  13. @Moon-howler
    Well, if you ask Clinton…he cares…. a lot….about your pain.

    1. Just as long as he feels my pain, I am happy.

  14. George S. Harris

    If the GOP intends to have a future, they have to isolate Cruz or perhaps even censure him as they did Joe McCarthy. He needs to be removed from committees (where the power is) and perhaps taken to the woodshed by someone–probably not McConnell since it seems Cruz has been his stalking horse. The only person who might be able to do the woodshed part might be McCain but if he truly is bowing out, maybe he will just go along for the ride. There are 535 voting souls in the Congress and something just over 10% of them have had a drink of the Tea Party Kool Aid. But maybe that 10% is enough to weaken the GOP and, as Moon says,
    send it to the elephant graveyard–2014 will be interesting and a test of how long voter memory really is. And let’s don’t forget, government closure and debt ceiling ghosts will return shortly after the first of the year, only a few short weeks away.

  15. Lyssa

    Vinceremo?? Bonus Fortuna. You have to be for something not against everything – and not tell the working class “this is a great day, this is exactly what we wanted” and cost us $26B.

    1. I think it is a last gasp “we will win,” which is completely against the will of most of the American people.

  16. Censored bybvbl

    It seems the problem the GOP is bigger than just the tea party. The GOP tries to sell that the rich are getting a raw deal while the Dems try to sell that the poor are getting a raw deal. When I compare the life styles between the rich and the poor, it seems self-evident that the GOP has a harder sell to make.

  17. middleman

    Ted Cruz is influential because the leadership of the GOP MADE him influential. They thought it was grand when the tea party was holding town halls against Obamacare and spreading the birther nonsense. They helped the tea party folks into congress so they would move the center farther right. McCain picked one for his running mate to curry tea party favor.

    Now the tea party is getting between the GOP and their money machine- the Chamber of Commerce, NAM, etc. NOW the GOP may finally act to purge the extremists-Mitch McConnell seems to think so…

    1. Elena and I were talking the other day about McCain and why on earth he chose Palin as a running mate. I wonder if he has regrets now. Elena and I think there is a good chance that he would have won the presidency if he hadn’t selected the sound-byte shrieker for a running mate. She was so unqualified for that level.

  18. Scout

    It was a rational choice in the context of the moment. The polling data were showing McCain’s team that Obama was a phenomenon, and that his trajectory was likely to continue to rise. Something daring had to be done. If Palin had been a typical governor of a typical state with no real scandal to her name, the choice of a woman VP candidate, a woman with strong family values, executive experience, very telegenic, might have provided the counterstroke to neutralize Obama’s charisma. They moved very quickly, and did not really understand the extent of Palin’s inexperience and ignorance. They assumed that she had a basic level of awareness of the nation and the world.

    I very much doubt McCain could have won in any circumstance. Consider also that he, fairly or unfairly, had to wear everything that happened in the Bush Administration and that the Great Recession burst upon us in the weeks immediately preceding the election. Palin was a long-shot, but, at the beginning, it seemed like a reasonable risk to take.

    Another thing to consider is that the sound-byte princess that we see now is not exactly the candidate that the Rs put forward in Denver. She got a lot of positive feedback for her Denver speech. The roar of the crowd is a powerful drug. As she suddenly became subjected to the pressure and exposure of a national campaign, she began to habitually reverting to the themes that made her crowds most friendly. She kind of got stuck in that endorphin cycle and has, post-election, found a way to make good money with it.

    1. She just sounds like such a moron every time she opens her mouth. I never remember her even sounding logical. I just thought she was out of her element from the git-go. There were a lot of independents who were a little skittish about Obama. I don’t know….hard to say what would have happened but the sound byte queen was a deal killer for McCain.

  19. Scout

    I don’t think she has gotten any better informed since 2008. She hasn’t grown. She instead settled for being a caricature of Tina Fey’s caricature. It doesn’t work for someone running for office (well, it doesn’t work very frequently), but it’s great for the Fox News crowd, who go to that outlet to be entertained by people who cater to their fears (as opposed to the MSNBC crowd, who go to that outlet to be entertained by people who cater to their fears about people who go to Fox News).

    1. Joe Scarborough should be getting divorced. His current wife has outgrown him. I want Mika to deck him the next time he interrupts her. If you can get past his obnoxiousness there is a pretty good crew on that show. The rest of the day is as described.

  20. Scout

    I agree that Morning Joe is about as good as it gets for political coverage on the cable networks. They have an interesting array of regulars and the discourse is pretty good. Joe does interrupt too much and has gotten awfully full of himself lately. He interrupts and bosses folks around. Mika used to seem like she was the den mother who kept the boys in line. Lately, however, she seems to be getting a bit unsettled. I think it was traumatic stress from the shut down. I hope she can return to being a steadying influence.

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