How bad has the Tea Party hurt the Republican Party brand? Conservative news aggregator Matt Drudge suggests Democrats will win back control of the House of Representatives next year. Talking Points Memo:
Conservative news aggregator Matt Drudge seemed to suggest Wednesday that Democrats will win back control of the House of Representatives next year.
In a message to his more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, Drudge predicted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) will soon return to the post she held from 2007 until 2011:
Speaker Pelosi Part 2: Opening Jan 5. 2015
— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) October 16, 2013
So kindly direct your abusive emails or the I-won’t-take-you-off-my-mailing-list-about-the-need-to-impeach-Obama-no-matter-what-you-say that you’re sending me because if a post criticizes the Tea Party or Republican House I MUST be working for Barack Obama or get money from George Soros to Mr. Drudge. (I love the one about how “your liberal Jewish mother should have taught you better.” Or the one “if you’re a real moderate, why aren’t you demanding to see this Kenyan Muslim’s real birth certificate?”)
The bottom line, as I noted HERE and HERE the Tea Party is destroying not just Republican “branding” but decades of imagery about the Republican Party being a party of adults (even if Democrats felt those adults were wrong on most things).
And Drudge is NOT ALONE in his belief and now some Republicans are saying out loud that perhaps a nice, big House defeat will help clean the Tea Party — which now is taking on all the allure of old, soggy tea bags — and cut it down to size in Congress and in the party:
Roll Call’s highly respected Stuart Rothenberg:
Last week I observed that I hadn’t yet seen “compelling evidence” that a Democratic political wave could be developing. I can no longer say that after seeing the recently released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
…Still, taken together, the poll shows significant deterioration in support for Republicans and in the party’s brand. It also shows opportunities for the president and his party.
And if this were October 2014, or even April 2014, I expect that other surveys, at the national, state and district levels, would show the same thing. Everyone who watches House races closely would be talking about a Democratic wave that certainly could hand the House over to a Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the final two years of Barack Obama’s second term. Certainly I would.
But the caution I offered in my last column still holds: Surveys conducted in the middle of a major event may have “a very short shelf life.” After the current confrontation ends, voters could easily return to their default partisan positions — or the shutdown and debt ceiling showdown could have created a new partisan baseline from which the GOP can never recover.
Rothenberg quotes what he wrote when Cruz was running for election — which shows you why he is so respected (consider him the anti-Dick Morris):
The difference between the two men is simple: Cruz is not willing to compromise even if it means being irrelevant to the legislative process, while Dewhurst is willing to look for middle ground. …
Indeed, given his worldview and personal style, I’d expect Cruz to become a significant voice for conservative purists who believe their party has been too willing to give up on principle.
If elected, Cruz certainly will join the GOP’s “Uncompromising Caucus,” which includes DeMint, Lee, Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and a handful of others, making it more difficult for his party’s leadership and for the Senate to deal with the nation’s problems.
He concludes:
That assessment of Cruz has been borne out by recent events. We’ll need to wait at least a few more months to see whether he has done enough to make Pelosi speaker once again.
The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher:
Yes. I cannot believe I’m saying this, but I hope the House flips to the Democrats in 2014, so we can be rid of these nuts. Let Ted Cruz sit in the Senate stewing in his precious bodily fluids, and let Washington get back to the business of governing.
The highly perceptible, MUST READ First Read put out by NBC News:
*** The GOP’s lost year: No matter the fallout, this is pretty clear: Almost a year removed from the Obama-Romney presidential election, 2013 has been a lost year for the Republican Party. Has it improved upon its image problem? Nope. Has it fixed its shortcomings with women and minority voters? Nope. Is it in a stronger place than it was in Oct. 2012? No way. Perhaps more than anything else, the GOP remains blinded by the health-care law — and by President Obama himself (who will never run for office again). Indeed, in some ways, you could see this entire shutdown/debt ceiling debate over the president’s health-care law as a replay of the House GOP’s impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 — a last-ditch fight against the term-limited incumbent. The good news for the Republican Party is that the Clinton impeachment is a reminder that its problems can be fixed. After all, the GOP won the White House just after Clinton’s impeachment.
And First Read contains this quite telling tidbit:
*** Joe Lhota: It’s “unbecoming” to link me to my national party: But if you want to see the state of the GOP’s brand right now, look no further than what happened in last night’s New York mayoral debate. Responding to Democrat Bill DeBlasio linking him with the national GOP, Republican Joe Lhota said, per the New York Daily News, “Bill, there you go again. You start talking about me like some kind of national Republican… Don’t lump me in with people I am in constant disagreement with. . . . It’s unbecoming.” (It’s “unbecoming” to link him to his national party?) While many might respond, “What would you expect in liberal New York City?” here’s something to remember: The city hasn’t had a Democratic mayor since … David Dinkins. One way to measure the health of a political party is to see how it’s faring outside its natural base. But outside of Chris Christie, can anyone say that a Republican is faring well in blue areas?
So there are two facts here:
FACT #1: Matt Drudge is not alone.
FACT #2: If the Republican Party wants to be more than a quaint, niche political party, it needs to truly stop listening to talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who want to only please the base and start to expand the tent — not have ideological bouncers throw people out and carefully screen entry, refusing to let some in because they don’t totally fit an ideological dress code. I can usually figure out easily what path the Republican Party WILL pursue — versus what path analysts and Republican political pros say it should take — by listening to Limbaugh. The party eventually falls in line.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.