Republican voters are fed up. They were told: “We need to win the House to block Obama!” So they elected a Republican House — and nothing changed. Then they were told: “That’s not good enough, we need to win the Senate, too.” So they elected a Republican Senate. And the result is this budget capitulation.That's columnist Marc Thiessen, generally conservative. And he's right. You can see a significant mismatch between the Republicans who walk around in Washington and the people who send them there.
The message to the grassroots is clear: Elected Republicans care more about their own preservation than they care about principle.
If the Republican establishment wonders why Donald Trump has been surging in the polls, they need only look in the mirror. They are the Dr. Frankensteins that created the Trump monster that is now wreaking havoc on the GOP village. They have no one to blame but themselves.
This is a very old phenomenon. When I first started following politics, you would hear that certain Republicans had "grown" in office. The source of this growth was, inevitably, when they went along with what the Democrats wanted. Sometimes these moves would earn the Republican "strange new respect" in the
It's always been an easy thing to do -- here in Minnesota, Arne Carlson has earned "Strange New Respect" so many times that he had his number retired, and if you ever hear from Dave Durenberger at all, it's usually because he's decided to bash his former colleagues.
I have thought that Trump would go away eventually, and that still may happen. But I'm starting to doubt it, and the zeitgeist that has filled his sails, and those of Ben Carson, is still out there. The smart Republicans understand it. And yes, despite a fair amount of evidence to the contrary, there are a few smart ones.
3 comments:
I basically been saying this same thing.
I'm thinking the wind will continue to favor Trump and Carson for a little while (criminy, how long IS it until the first caucus?) and then the Republican voters, after kicking up their heels, will want to put those heels back into something more comfortable (electable), like Cruz or Rubio. Because THIS time it will be different.
I'm inclined towards a middle position; those in DC are acutely aware that there is a fourth estate that is reliably Democratic, and hence one or even zero official branches of government in the hands of Democrats poses a huge difficulty for Republicans. You can either do the Trump "IDGAS" approach ("I don't give a ....."), or you can really do some hard work and make it difficult for the media to object to you--"can't we all agree that....?" and that sort of thing.
Both are necessary to a degree, and Trump is of course the embodiment of IDGAS. The trouble with that is that you burn so many bridges that it only lasts for a while. My take is that Reagan's genius is to artfully mix both to get around the media, and even he was only partially successful.
In this case, though, it is certainly disheartening that today's GOP really does neither. Is there no one there who really knows how to think on his feet?
Post a Comment