The Sole of the Republican Party

I love me some Sarah Palin. She is the one true voice of the Tea Party among politicians. She started in the PTA and eventually because the governor of Alaska. She fought corruption in her own party and beat the party machine. One thing she didn’t do was go up against Democrats. Newt Gingrich started his career in enemy territory. Unlike Mitt Romney, he didn’t become more liberal to win elections, he became more conservative and won Congress.

In the last century, Republicans have had both houses of Congress for only 24 years. Until 1994, they last had both houses in 1954 (for one term). Gingrich, who was known for crazy ideas, had one just crazy enough to work. He ran a national Congressional campaign based on conservative principles and government reform. There was a proposed balanced budget amendment, welfare reform, tax cuts and term limits. All went up for a vote in 1995. The amendments failed and much of the legislation died in the Senate.

Democrats eroded the Republican majority in 1996 and 1998, causing Republicans to lose faith in Gingrich’s leadership. After Gingrich left, a basically rudderless Republican Congress had weak gains in 2000 and small gains after the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in 2002 and 2004.

12 years after the Contract with America, (the original term limit proposal was for 12 years, which many pledged to at the time) the Republican Congress had become as corrupt and profligate as the Democrats. Democrats ran in 2006 on a platform of ending the wars (which they failed to deliver) and won back Congress. Voters were tired of Republican inaction.

If you believe that Gingrich was a master tactician who came up with the Contract as a way to gain power, he was a genius with an inability to lead. But if Gingrich truly believed the elements of the Contract were the way to fix government, he would have been very disappointed by the results and may not have even wanted to fight for the leadership by 1998.

The Obot media has gone to great pains to paint government reform and balanced budgets as ultra right-wing craziness. They want the Republican Party to be seen as far out of the mainstream. At the same time, they stupidly promote the stories of dissension in the ranks that proves the opposite. There is a Mitt Romney wing of the party where winning means you’re right. Then there’s the Tea Party wing, made up of actual citizens, who think that if you have to lose to uphold your principles, you’re done the right thing. What they believe in sounds a lot like the Contract with America.

Whatever happened to Reagan’s 11th commandment?

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Ronald Reagan once said:

The personal attacks against me during the primary finally became so heavy that the state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, postulated what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. It’s a rule I followed during that campaign and have ever since.

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Whatever happened to Reagan’s 11th commandment? The reason I ask is laid out here in this post at Legal Insurrection:

It’s not always framed using the word “crazy,” but that’s the theme — he’s erratic, can’t be trusted, has a personality defect which makes him dangerous.  TPM sums up the Romney theme:

Launching an aggressive attack on rival Newt Gingrich, the Romney campaign is engaging a character-assassination strategy, painting the former speaker as unfit for a position of leadership.

We hear it every day from David Frum (“A Gingrich presidency, if such a thing can even be imagined, would be a chaotic catastrophe”); Jennifer Rubin (“Gingrich’s mind  is an attic of  throwaway, unusable and downright goofy ideas, piled high like newspapers in the room of a troubled subject on “Hoarders”), Ramesh Ponnuru (“he is temperamentally unsuited for the presidency”); Peggy Noonan (“He’s a trouble magnet”); Ann Coulter (“Not only were they completely crazy, but Newt’s grand schemes didn’t quite fit the Republican model of a small, unintrusive federal  government); and other pro-Romney media types.

We’re also hearing it from Romney campaign surrogates like John Sununu (“He all but called Gingrich crazy”) and Peter King (“doesn’t have the discipline and doesn’t have the capacity to control himself”).

This strategy is the same as the Democrats’ “strategy of crazy” launched against the Tea Party movement in 2009 and crystallized as policy after Scott Brown’s election in January 2010.  Your opponent isn’t simply wrong, or not the best choice, or a flip-flopper, he’s nuts.

At Slate, one prominent left-leaning blogger comes right out and says what his “conservative” compatriots have been saying implicitly, Is Newt Nuts?

I really don’t see how the Romney supporters using the strategy of crazy have left themselves an exit strategy if and when their candidate loses to Gingrich.  If they have convinced themselves that Newt really is crazy, then there is no way they could support him even over Obama.

And frankly, I don’t expect them to.

Update:  Add David Brooks (h/t Ben Smith) to the team (“He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance”).

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Ol’ Smilin’ Mitt has cruised through the past few months without breaking a sweat or getting his hands dirty. Now his campaign is stirred up like a bunch of scared chihuahuas.

All’s fair in love and war and politics ain’t beanbag. I’m not gonna shed a tear if Naughty Newty gets torn limb from limb by the media lapdogs. But I’ve never seen the GOPers air their laundry in public like this before. It’s like they would rather see Obama win then face the prospect of President Gingrich.

Personally I think Bush – Obama – Gingrich is the trifecta of bad. Maybe the Mayans were right about 2012.

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It’s NOT brown bottle botulism

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Still not feeling well. I wish I was hungover, cuz then I’d know why I feel like shit.

This is an open thread. I’ll post more later.

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