Coming Together
by digby
To all those people who thought that last night’s deal was a master stroke to finally separate the GOP from the Tea Party, think again:
Leaders of the small-government, tea-party movement are generally giving House Speaker John Boehner high marks for his leadership in the spending showdown, even though the agreement eventually reached Friday night fell short of the cuts the tea party once demanded. The relationship between the Republican leadership and these activists is one of the most important determinants of how this Congress will manage the fiscal fights to come. Tea-party backers have been leery of Mr. Boehner for months, questioning his zeal and driving him toward a tougher line on spending. As negotiations inched close to a deal late Friday, much of the movement’s institutional leadership resisted raising the temperature and were willing to cut Mr. Boehner some slack, in hope that he will extract more dramatic concessions in the budget showdowns to come.[…]
Conservative activists will rely on the leadership of Mr. Boehner, a man who re-emerged into Republican leadership on a platform of fiscal rectitude. His management of his restive caucus and the unpredictable tea-party movement has proved more successful than even some of his colleagues thought possible when the new Congress convened earlier this year. “They’re doing pretty well so far,” said Matt Kibbe, president and chief executive of FreedomWorks, a conservative organization that has helped fund the tea-party movement. “If the Republicans back down from the fight just because the Democrats are itching for a government shutdown, that’ll be disappointing to us, but we understand they only control a third of the policy-making here.” Chris Chocolla, president of Club for Growth, a political action committee that has financed conservative primary challengers to Republican incumbents, offered a similar perspective. “This isn’t the most important battle. We have to get this 2011 business behind us and focus on the FY2012 budget and the debt-limit vote,” he said. Some tea-party members voiced support for Republicans pushing for policy issues. “The government is wasting tax dollars on things that should not be paid for by the general public,” says Diane Canney, a 48-year-old stay-at-home mother who is also a co-founder of the Valley Forge Patriots. “For me as a Catholic who does not believe in abortions, to take my taxes and fund Planned Parenthood, that is not fair,” she says. […]
Gene Clem, a director for the Michigan Tea Party Alliance, a coalition of some 30 tea-party groups in the southwestern part of the state, says members are “pretty happy” because “we got quite a few cuts and we made the point that we have to change our way of thinking and that the deficit just can’t go on.” Some may be keeping their powder dry for future rounds. “I’m really disappointed, but I know [Mr. Boehner] is in a difficult situation,” said retiree Betty Dunkel, the 75-year-old co-founder of the Valley Forge Patriots, a tea-party group outside Philadelphia. “I don’t like it, but at this point, let’s just get something done, let’s get on with it and then work very, very hard on 2012 budget—and we also have the debt ceiling to deal with.”
They are Republicans. The Tea Party is just another word for “conservative Republican.” Boehner used them, they didn’t use him. A good leader knows how to manage expectations and Boehner turns out to be very good at it. He came in with a low number, then “capitulated” to his base and raised it over and over again. He couldn’t quite come through on getting rid of funding for cervical cancer screening and birth control (Tea Party priorities, apparently) but promised to bring it up again and again in the endless budget battles to come. What’s not to like?
And this is enough to make them giddy — and is, after all, the whole point:
The agreement would cut about $38 billion from the 2010 budget baseline and $78.5 billion from President Obama’s 2011 budget proposa
Last night more Republicans voted for the 7 day extension than Democrats. It’s entirely likely that this bill will eventually pass with far more Republican votes in the House (and maybe the Senate) than Democratic votes. And the when the president signs this perfect bipartisan bill (a Democratic president bucking his own party) the loud moan you will hear throughout the land is the sound of the entire Village coming together in la petite mort.
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