The Teabagger Party, Pt. II

I noted last week what looked like an ominous development for the Republicans: that the teabagger movement has started moving beyond its original premise (savaging Obama for daring to win 2008 presidential election) and has actually begun producing candidates in an attempt to move the GOP more to the right.

The example I cited was a teabagger candidate who was threatening to siphon votes away from the establishment Republican candidate in a special congressional election in New York. It seemed that it was the wrong time to empower a loud, large minority of hard-right activists at the same time the GOP was strategizing to regain some of the ground it lost in the 2006 and 2008 congressional elections.

The Politico's Alex Isenstadt writes about this dynamic today in a piece titled: "Tea partiers turn on GOP leadership".

It’s an unusual predicament for the Republican Party, since the conservative-oriented issues that animate Tea Party activists once seemed destined to make the movement a valuable auxiliary to the Republican Party.

While there’s little evidence of tea party activist support for Democratic candidates, the specific notion of electing a GOP majority hasn’t ranked high on their agenda either.

[...]

In a handful of states, tea party activists have zeroed in on House Republican incumbents and have launched primary challenges in protest of their past support for the controversial Wall Street bank bailout.

[...]

For some, supporting insurgent campaigns or waging primary bids just isn’t a strong enough signal to send to a Republican Party that has abandoned core conservative policies.

Erick Erickson, founder and editor of the influential conservative blog RedState, has urged tea party activists to “put down the protest signs” and stage takeovers of local Republican parties.

This is consistent with what I observed last week:

The teabaggers are the Club for Growth crowd on steroids, but without the smarts. The GOP unleashed them at precisely the wrong time. A loud, scary, extremist base actually producing candidates is the last thing the Republicans can afford if their goal is to fight back from a 177-seat minority in the House and a 40-seat minority in the senate.

[...]

The teabaggers constitute a vocal, know-nothing contingent with a massive sense of entitlement. They’re not fighting to regain a congressional majority. They think they are fighting to “take their country back” from MarxistFascistHitlerMuslamObama. They couldn’t care less if their presence in an election threatens to siphon votes from the establishment Republican candidate. They are True Believers, and if you ain’t for ‘em, you’re agin ‘em.

Good luck stuffing that crazy genie back into its bottle, GOP.

But Isenstadt, in focusing on the teabaggers' desire to move the Republican Party farther to the right, misses an important part of why this phenomenon could be detrimental to the GOP. The very presence of a Tea Party candidate in a tight race could siphon enough votes away from the establishment Republican candidate to throw the election to the Democrat. And this is exactly what the organizers of the movement seem to be agitating for.

“We will be a headache for anyone who believes the Constitution of the United States … isn’t to be protected,” said Dick Armey, chairman of the anti-tax and limited government advocacy group FreedomWorks, which helped plan and promote the tea parties, town hall protests and the September ‘Taxpayer March’ in Washington. “If you can’t take it seriously, we will look for places of other employment for you.”

“We’re not a partisan organization, and I think many Republicans are disappointed we are not,” added Armey, a former GOP congressman.

This threat looms as we speak in the special election in NY-23 and in the U.S. Senate race in Arkansas. There, incumbent Democrat Blanche Lincoln is polling behind four potential challengers from the right, including the head of the Arkansas T.E.A. Party who was three points ahead of her in a recent survey by Rasmussen.

An insurgency like that could split the Republican vote enough to allow even an unpopular Democratic incumbent to squeak past for a win.

Swamped

I have to say, I just don't see this little experiment lasting too long. Frankly, it's probably already time to put it out of its misery.

Former Republican congressman Dick Armey, in his new position as a blogger at Time's Swampland, took on, in one short post, Social Security, healthcare, energy independence, teacher's unions, and summer vacation (!). Within the context of a critique of Tuesday's GOP candidates' debate, and bouncing from one topic to the next with zero factual followthrough, Armey's post amounted to nothing more than an unordered list of conservative think-tank talking points.

On Social Security:

The impending collapse of Social Security and Medicare will be the largest bankruptcy in human history. It is an avalanche aimed squarely at the American economy.

On education:

We heard a great deal about the American family, but no candidate talked about education, or more importantly, the decay within our nation's schools. This month millions of kids are out of school for summer break. If only we could break the stranglehold of union control over the classroom.

On energy policy:

It is not by accident that America has a similar amount of refining capacity as we did in the 1970s and no new nuclear generation in more than a generation.

Cars don't run on sound bites, homes are not heated by good intentions, and demagoguery continues to dominate the energy debate. We need more than sound bite based policy, like 20 percent of alternative fuels by 2020. (And the Democrats are even more misguided.)

On healthcare:

Republicans are heading in the right direction in health care. Giuliani advocated individual control of health care spending. Hunter says you should be able to buy health care from across state lines.

This sort of empty rhetoric might play well at Republican campaign rallies and at AEI luncheons, but unfortunately for Dick Armey, the readers at Swampland are significantly more discerning and knowledgeable than the GOP faithful at whom he is accustomed to bloviating. Their reactions were merciless.

If you had a clue, you would know that Social Security cannot go bankrupt -- one would assume a former Congressman who claims to be concerned about the issue would know that the Social Security law is written in such a way that if there ever comes a time when the trust fund runs out of money and Social Security tax receipts are less than scheduled benefits, benefits are reduced.

In other words, if/when the trust fund is depleted, the law says that Social Security becomes PAYGO with reduced benefits.

Anyone who actually understand the issue understands this much --- so why the heck are we being subjected to these flat out lies?

Posted by p_lukasiak
June 5, 2007
***
Mr. Armey, you are clearly out of your depth when talking about the so-called impending demise of Social Security. But go ahead, do please keep talking about privatizing it. Convince your friends and family, too. And the candidates of your party. Please. No really.

Posted by James, Los Angeles
June 5, 2007
***
Umm, what are you saying here? Those evil unions force our children out of their schools? Turning them out on their ears?

That's what I want to see in our next Republican presidential candidate: a bold willingness to denounce summer vacation.

And be sure to blame vacations on the unions! That'll win over the working stiffs.

Posted by John
June 5, 2007
***
Dick:

Link to the sources of your 'facts' so that the rest of us can scrutinize them. It's a tool commonly used by those interested in making legitimate arguments.

Posted by Nick
June 6, 2007
***
Dick,

Maybe you should try writing a post about one topic. Make it about two or three paragraphs. Have one or two sentences that state a conclusion. Fill the rest of he post with facts that support your conclusion.

Right now you are just jumping from topic to topic without saying anything. You have three sentences on health care and three sentences on energy in one post. Those are big topics. You can't get much substance out of that.

If you are going to write something like "If only we could break the stranglehold of union control over the classroom," you are going to have to include in your post an argument about why union control is bad. Otherwise you are just spouting platitudes.

The kind of stuff you are writing might be ok for cable news where the goal is to fill 15 seconds of air time. Blogging is different. The point isn't to fill up space. The point is to express an argument and support it, preferably with verifiable facts.

P.S. platitudes are not facts.

Posted by Carneyvore
June 6, 2007

And it goes on and on and on like that.

In a speech to the GOP faithful, platitudes such as the ones Armey spouts here are usually followed by thunderous cheers. They are , after all, typically used as applause lines. On the cable shout shows, the followup is non-existent, so he and his ideological brethren can rail against all the usual targets all the live long day and never worry about being challenged on a factual basis.

As Anonymous Liberal pointed out in a critique of an earlier Armey post, the blogosphere, at least the left-leaning blogosphere, is a different animal.

As regular patrons of the blogosphere are well aware, right-wing blogs rarely have comment sections, particularly unmoderated ones. They don't have them for precisely this reason: because much of what passes for commentary in right-wing circles is just not factually or logically supportable. And if these blogs had comment sections, a bunch of people who know better would point out all the logical and factual flaws in every post.

There is no better example of a functioning marketplace of ideas than a blog with an active and open comment section. The fact that most right-wing commentators choose not to engage with this market speaks volumes about their confidence in their own ideas.

I suspect Armey is wondering just what on earth he has gotten himself into. I suspect also that unless he has the discipline to accept the criticism and use it to actually get better at blogging, he won't be able to endure much more of this.