Dems in array; McCarthy struggles to keep GOP afloat
The non-drubbing of the Democratic Party last month should have been a clue. Republicans loudly predicted a “red wave.” Did you hear? In the first midterm of a new president, something like that is the norm. It’s just that with Donald Trump (indictments pending) and seditious conspiracy trials over a violent insurrection, norms went out the window. Americans noticed. Somehow.
Republicans are reaping the rancid harvest sown three decades ago. The party is adrift (if not sinking). It is “what happens to ships boarded by pirates, plundered and set aflame on the high seas,” writes David Von Drehle. The mojo Republicans had in the 1970s and 1980s has vanished like morning sea mist.
The landslides ended in 1992 when Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot’s third-party campaign helped torpedo George H.W. Bush’s reelection, aided by Patrick J. Buchanan’s far-right challenge (Washington Post):
One of the fathers of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., had Buchanan on his mind in the months leading up to that fateful 1992 campaign. In a 40,000-word essay published late in 1991, Buckley examined the pitchfork populist’s tendency to deal in antisemitic tropes and allusions. His conclusion: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it.”
George W. Bush’s election held off the far right until the election of a Black man to the White House. Then all hell broke loose with the T-party.
“Buchananism, with its ugly undertones and shades of paranoid grievance, was the only energy remaining in the GOP,” writes Von Drehle. Perhaps it is fitting that Donald J. Trump, the faux-billionaire, reality TV star with zero experience in elected office began his takeover of the party riding down a golden escalator.
From Buchanan to Gingrich to Trump, the drivers of the Republican Party have pushed relentlessly toward anger, accusation, isolationism, pessimism and paranoia. In the guise of battling the left, they wage their most effective warfare against their fellow Republicans. Having purged proponents of the overwhelmingly popular ideas of the 1970s and 1980s — strong alliances and free markets, individual freedom and personal responsibility, the rule of law, faith in the future — they offer nothing positive. Literally: In 2020, the GOP did not offer any platform.
Americans who value stability noticed a party adrift and in 2020 selected instead a familiar, if similarly old hand. In 2022, the country was not going to hand dozens of House seats and additional Senate seats to a Republican Party taken over by lunatic pirates.
As Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ends her storied tenure as Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, her would-be Republican replacement, finds himself home alone without Macaulay Culkin’s resourcefulness. With a razor-thin incoming House majority, McCarthy will have to sell his soul to extremists for any hope “of eking out enough votes to become speaker,” writes Dana Milbank.
The crazies mean to provoke a government shutdown over the budget. McCarthy would prefer to avoid that torpedo headed towards his nascent speakership:
But McCarthy, evidently lacking faith in his own ability to get a deal through the House, is pushing to get it done now. Continuing resolutions “are not where we want to be,” he said this week. As Politico artfully put it: “Nobody trusts McCarthy to pass anything (not even McCarthy).”
For good reason. As many as 20 House Republicans oppose McCarthy for speaker (five of them in categorical terms). If he loses more than a few, the race for speaker could go to a second ballot on the House floor for the first time in a century. So he has been making desperate public warnings to fellow Republicans and offering holdouts whatever they demand. (The latest: a promised investigation of the House’s own Jan. 6 committee.)
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, meanwhile, is poised to take over leadership of his caucus from Pelosi with no apparent infighting. Democrats are in array.
Milbank quips:
There is no question about it: Hakeem Jeffries has the chops to be Democratic leader.
He chops left, right and center. He chops with one hand; he chops with two hands. He raises his index fingers and wags them. He points up, down and forward. He interlocks his fingers as if cracking his knuckles. He makes fists, holds his palms out and does loop-the-loops with his hands.
Watching his inaugural news conference as Democratic leader-designate this week was like watching a symphony conductor. I was so mesmerized by the hand gestures that I had to check the transcript to see what he had said.
Jeffries “has the politician’s gift of revealing nothing and the orator’s gift of doing it with great energy and enthusiasm.” He’ll need it, Milbank suggests. “Those on the far left, who already view him with suspicion, will in due time pressure the caucus to take politically unpopular stands.”
Not having Pelosi to kick around anymore, Republicans are trying to brand the moderate, establishment Jeffries as positioned to Pelosi’s left.
Good luck with that.