Just an annoyance:
I’ve been watching some of the fallout from the Specter switch on MSNBC and I can’t help but notice a complete disconnect between my definition of the far-right Republican base and the commentators’ definition of the Party’s base. Let me see if I have my facts right: 1) Arlen Specter was being challenged in the Republican Primary by Pat Toomey, former director of the Club for Growth; 2) The Club for Growth is an economically Right-wing group that came out of the libertarian CATO Institute; 3) Specter had come under attack from Republicans for voting in favor of Obama’s stimulus bill.
So, what about Specter’s switch yesterday demonstrated the power of the social/religious conservatives within the Republican Party? Why has MSNBC had Michael Smerconish on every 30 minutes to argue that Republicans are losing moderates because the Party leaders and base aren’t “libertarian” enough (and that if they would stay away from social issues and focus on economic conservatism, they would hold Senators like Specter)? Why does Chris Matthews believe this is further evidence that the Republican Party is becoming a “religious party?” Even Howard Dean got in the act with some convoluted explanation about the Club for Growth becoming Right-wing because they had to take on the smorgasbord of Republican social issues. Howard Dean! The “tax-hiking, government expanding” target of the Club for Growth ad five years ago! It’s not like Pat Toomey came out of the Family Research Council or the Christian Coalition.
As for the base of the Party, it seems to me that the assorted bag of nutjobs who gathered around the country a couple weeks ago were there to protest taxes, not abortion. They threw tea bags, not Bibles. The C-PAC convention a couple months ago? Their beef was socialism, not godlessness.
I just don’t get how the economic conservatives can always skate by in the media with an assumption of rationality, and the crazies on the Right are always sorted with the religious fundamentalists. That’s not a defense of said fundamentalists – they certainly have their share of crazies – but I don’t think they own the exclusive rights. It must drive the Club for Growth crazy too… they’ve worked so hard to take down any Republican who doesn’t want to spit on poor people, and they get no credit for it.
There was one bright spot. On Hardball last night, Hendrik Hertzberg went appropriately retro in quoting an interview he did with Mike Huckabee a little over a year ago. On what Huckabee termed the “Club for Greed”:
They have a disregard for the realities of having to actually govern, when you have a broad array of responsibilities. Governing would be very simple under their formula. It wouldn’t require an I.Q. above broccoli to do it, because you simply go in and you say, . . .We’re going to eliminate all the taxes.’ The budget is very simple. You don’t really make any decisions. You don’t manage or govern. You operate essentially like a vending machine: you put in the money and you get out limited government, and you don’t care if it hurts somebody.
He also referred to them as “cowardly” and as a “despicable political hit organization.”
Wow… I miss primary season.
Aside from Hertzberg, no guest made any distinction between the cultural Right and the economic Right. Specter was apparently forced out of the Republican Party because he’s pro-choice, which I guess just never caught up to him in the previous three decades of being a pro-choice Republican Senator.
Now, I’m all for a shrinking Republican Party that can’t compete in the Northeast. Or the mid-Atlantic. Or the West Coast. Or the rust belt. Or the Southwest. That’s all just fine with me. But, credit where credit is due: the Republican Party has become a far-Right libertarian extremist Party dominated by the Club for Growth. And that seems to be the take-away lesson from yesterday’s switch.
On a sidenote, while I’m glad Democrats picked up the PA seat, I really can’t stand disloyalty.
