How many of you remember waiting around for the GOP’s rich overlords to step in and save us from teabagger hell? What a great feeling that was. I get the impression that John Boehner had the same thought – he would drive the White House to offer up the whole farm, minus a cow or two, and then a certain group of folks would sit Eric Cantor down and force him to take it. Blowing up the country over a rhetorical cow is pretty stupid.
Then the overlords did step in and Eric Cantor told them to eat a bag of dicks. And thus we settled the question of whether some shadowy oligarchs still pull the strings of the Republican party. They do not. To be sure John Boehner and grampa Mitch will still dance on command, and it still pays dividends to control the two highest ranking GOP officials, but that kind of control buys less than it did now that the supposed party chiefs need permission from Cantor, Bachmann, DeMint and Rand Paul to wipe their nose.
Tea party Republicans have exactly one kind of power, the suicide primary. If the base sets aside seniority or electability and makes an example out of anyone who steps over some arbitrary line, then they make it extremely unlikely that anyone will. As long as they demonstrate that winning elections comes second to keeping the doctrine pure, like they did in that NY-23 special election, the the suicide primary has almost the same effect as the Twilight Zone kid who could send people to an endless cornfield.
You can hardly call the new bosses ‘overlords’. Overlords you can talk with, work with and count on to at least understand strategic retreat and which policies help and hurt their interests. With the suicide primary, who do you talk to? If Congressional GOP had any more handle on this question than anyone else, they would hang up on Erick Erickson and burn the phone (link in this diary).
I’ve gotten lots of calls about compromise this weekend. Senators have called. Congressmen have called. Staffers have called.
[…] Here’s my response: don’t compromise.
Imagine for a second that Erickson told his DC friends to compromise with Obama. In a week David Frum and Bill Buckley’s kid would make room on their outcast bench for Erick and any politician who took his advice. Erickson is riding that tiger next to the politicians who phoned him. Read this to see Nate Silver make a similar point with numbers and shit.
If David Koch and Richard Mellon Scaife are overlords then I guess you could call the drooling mob behind the suicide primary the GOP’s underlords. With conciliation fever still strong in the administration, these nuts will most likely go on setting the agenda until either (a) America throws the entire idiot party on its ass in 2012, or else (b) a charismatic leader channels their incoherent rage into a near-unstoppable movement in the midst of financial and political chaos.