Republicans Begin to Question the Competence of their Leadership
The captains of the Republican ship - Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and the feckless Republican Chairman Michael Steele - ran the Republican ship right into the rocks. Is it any wonder that the crew is beginning to mutter about mutiny? In recent days I have spoken to a number of Republican members of
Congress who are not at all happy with the leadership of their party.Of course you still hear pundits boldly predicting that the health care bill will be a hard sell with the American people. But I'll bet any one of them a steak dinner that by Election Day a vote for the health care bill will be a big plus in most contested districts. The reasons are simple:* Because it's passed into law, Democrats are now the ones who will be in a position to demand that Republicans keep their "hands off our health care." And we can be very specific about provisions that go into effect right away.
Doesn't sound like the high political ground to me - or to an increasing number of Republican Members of Congress.
* By Election Day, voters will understand that the campaign to gin up fear about health care reform was completely bogus. This is particularly true of seniors who will find that the bill did not - as the Republicans claimed -- cut their Medicare. In fact they will find that it has strengthened their Medicare - that the only thing cut was a subsidy to big private insurers.
Let's face it - after while it's hard to convince people that the sky is falling if pieces of the sky never crash through your roof. Of course their management of the health care strategy isn't the only cause of alarm in the Republican cloak rooms. Their political operation is a mess.
Last week's PR disaster may turn out to be the tipping point that causes confidence in the Party apparatus to tank. Michael Steele has never been a popular RNC Chairman. He never did understand that the role of a Party Chair is to build the party organization -- not the Chairman's political profile.
Some politicians (think Ronald Reagan) were like Teflon - nothing would stick. Steele is more like Velcro - everything sticks to him. This is a real problem for the Party since it takes two thirds of the Republican National Committee to oust him midterm - and it is especially difficult to do because he is the first African American Republican Chairman. All the Republicans need is to oust Steele and give the country one more example of how the Republican Party has been reduced to a narrow regional and racial enclave in a corner of America.
The RNC, National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) all had less cash on hand at the end of February than their Democratic counterparts - and in the case of the House Committee the difference was enormous. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had $20 million on hand while the NRSC had only $6.1 million. That's pretty amazing when you consider that Republicans in Congress spend all of their time defending America's wealthiest corporate special interests.
One key explanation is incompetence.And that's one of the reasons Karl Rove, former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie, and other Republican heavyweights have set up a new, competing organization called American Crossroads.
As the social and geographic base of the Republican Party has shrunk over the last ten years, the "movement" portion of the Party has become more and more vocal - especially among Members of the House.
We'll see a spotlight turned on this cleavage when immigration reform moves to center stage in the next few weeks. The business community has reached out across party lines and wants to fix the broken immigration system. And many Republican Party leaders realize that if they fail to compete for Latino voters - the fastest-growing minority in the country - they will probably doom any chance the party has of ever returning as a national presence.
But much of the radical fringe of the Republican base does not like the growing presence of Latino culture in the United States, and that creates yet another critical problem for Republican leaders.
When it comes to immigration, the forces within the party favoring reform may find help from an unlikely source - the evangelical religious community. Like the Catholic Church, evangelical churches have a massive institutional interest in appealing to Latinos, since the Hispanic community is the largest source of their own organizational growth. That may help tip the balance on immigration - at least for some of the Republican leadership, like Senator Lindsey Graham, that understand the importance of this issue to the Party's future.
The problem isn't that they don't have a program. The problem is that their programs led us into the worst economic and foreign policy catastrophes in half a century. Their problem isn't that they were unable to enact their policies. The problem is that they did enact their policies - and they were disasters.
The program of the Republican Party is the deregulation of Wall Street; it's the privatization of Social Security; it's doing away with Medicare and replacing it with vouchers. Their program is to stand up for the big Wall Street banks, the health insurance companies, and the very rich. Try running in the midterms on that program.
That's why they were reduced to being the "Party of No" in the first place. They couldn't very well offer their true policy alternatives, because they were politically radioactive.