Quo Vadis, Tea Party?

PERRYSCOPE
Perry Diaz

Is the Republican Party in disarray?  No.  Is it dysfunctional?  Probably, yes.  Is it crumbling? Not yet.  Yes, at the rate the bloodletting is going on, the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln is going through like what “Honest Abe” went through during his tumultuous presidency—a civil war.

           

What was once the party that welcomed – nay, tolerated – people with moderate social values into its ranks, has gone through a drastic makeover in 2010 when a new crop of political activists mushroomed in the aftermath of the 2008 defeat of the Republican Party at the hands of Barack Obama.  Calling themselves the Tea Party movement, these activists vowed to fight President Obama and deny him a second term.

And like clockwork, everything went according to plan until Election Day when the Obama blitzkrieg rolled into the nine battlefield states, capturing all except North Carolina. 

 And by the time Ohio was won, the election was over.  With 303 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206 – and Florida still voting – Romney conceded defeat.

A month after the devastating loss of Romney, the Republicans were still trying to figure out why they lost the election.  For the past two years after capturing the governorship and legislative bodies in many states, the Republicans systematically put in place legislations that were purportedly designed to prevent “voter fraud.”  However, the Democrats claimed that these laws would actually do the opposite; that is, suppress the vote of an electorate that is demographically leaning or likely to vote for Democrats.

But the Federal courts overturn most of these “voter suppression” laws in the weeks before Election Day.  With the bad publicity created by the Republicans’ attempt to suppress the vote, it generated more interest among Obama supporters – particularly minority and young voters – who turned out in huge numbers on Election Day.  A lot of them had to wait for hours – as much as seven hours – to cast their vote.  In Florida, voters stayed in line until the wee hours of the following day even after Romney conceded.

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`Romney, who was confident that he was going to win — he didn’t bother to prepare a concession speech just in case he’d lose — was reportedly shell-shocked by the sudden turn of events as states began reporting the election results. What surprised Romney was that he lost in eight of the nine battleground states when his internal polls showed that he’d win them all by at least five percentage points in each of them.  What the hell happened?  Where were the “angry white men” whom Romney cultivated and depended on to vote for him?  But as it turned out, there were more angrier women, minority, and young voters than these “angry white men.”  And this brings to mind:       What made them angrier than the “angry white men?” For starters, the Republican Party’s rightwing extremist agenda have alienated a lot of voters.  And they would continue to alienate them for as long as they continue to peddle their extreme rightwing agenda.  But their problem is that a lot of Republican right-wingers believe that they lost the election because Romney was not conservative enough.

But the truth of the matter is that Romney lost because he ran on an ultra-conservative agenda, which is a death knell to anyone seeking the presidency.  History tells us that nobody has won the White House on an extremist rightwing or leftwing agenda.  A case in point was ultra-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater who lost to moderate Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.  Likewise with ultra-liberal Democrat George McGovern who lost to centrist Republican Richard M. Nixon in 1972.

In essence, to win in a presidential campaign, the candidate should run on a moderate/centrist agenda.  Indeed, it was Nixon who said it best when he wrote a letter to Bob Dole in 1995 when he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination.  “To win the Republican nomination,” he told Dole, “you have to run as far as you can to the right because that’s where 40% of the people who decide the nomination are. And to get elected you have to run as fast as you can back to the middle, because only about 4% of the nation’s voters are on the extreme right wing.”

Romney tried to do that by running a rightwing campaign during the primaries and then made a sudden – and unexpected — detour to the middle during the first presidential debate, which took Obama completely off guard.  Obama lost that first debate but recovered in the second and third debates. But         Romney’s shift to the middle came too late.  By that time, most voters had already made their choices and the early voters had already voted.

So, what is in store for the Republican Party?  Can the GOP recover from the 2012 election debacle and remain a viable political party capable of winning the presidency?  But with the Tea Party still in control of the Republican Party apparatus and dictating its political agenda, it would be difficult for the Republican Party to attract minority, women, and young people into a “Big Tent” that welcomes people of diverse political persuasions.  The party tried it in the 1980s and 1990s but failed to keep them simply because of its strict adherence to ideological purity and intolerance to deviation from the party’s rigid stance on issue… or, as Republicans love to say, “core values.”

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In the aftermath of the Republican Party’s defeat in the 2012 elections, Tea Party leaders are jumping ship.  Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey left FreedomWorks – which was instrumental in the rise of the Tea Party movement – in the wake of its dismal performance where only a quarter of the Tea Party candidate won.  Armey blamed the GOP leadership for their losses, which include the controversial Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana who lost in their Senate bids.  In addition, Tea Partiers Allen West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois, who were elected just two years ago, failed in their reelection bids.

But what shocked a lot of Tea Party members was the abrupt and unexpected resignation of Sen. Jim Demint from the U.S. Senate.  Demint, the Tea Party’s top leader in the Upper Chamber, is leaving to become president of Heritage Foundation, the leading think tank in Washington, DC. 

He said that the move was a “promotion” for him.  However, speculation is rife that he was pressured into resigning by big donors as a result of his failure to elect eight Tea Party senatorial candidates in 2010 and 2012.Meanwhile, the two unelected Republican leaders, anti-tax guru Grover Norquist and Super PAC mastermind Karl Rove, are trying hard to keep their grip on power from slipping.  But with the specter of a “fiscal cliff” at the end of this year, many House Republicans are breaking their anti-tax pledge to Norquist.  And Rove, who spent $390 million on campaigns, is having a hard time explaining to his donors why he lost just about every one of them.

Leaderless and rudderless, the Tea Party movement seems like it is about to implode.  And with the country unwilling to embrace its extreme rightwing agenda, it needs an extreme makeover to survive and remain a viable political entity. Quo vadis, Tea Party?