This fits into the larger narrative of the effective decentralization fo the Republican party (yes, this is the third Weigel link of the day):
On Friday, the National Republican Trust PAC bought Web ads at the sites of the Daily Caller and the Weekly Standard with a simple message: “Republicans you can Trust: with your principles… your time… your investment.”
Was the PAC making a jab at the RNC?
“Yeah, we did post that ad in response to the nightclub story,” said Scott Wheeler, the executive director of the PAC. “We didn’t want to take a cheap shot at the RNC or Michael Steele, but we definitely wanted to distinguish ourselves as being different and not part of the establishment.”
General Republican messaging was outsourced to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh long ago. Now, fundraising is being outsourced to PACs. I suspect Citizens United will accelerate this.
As much as I don’t like the Republican party as it’s been traditionally constituted, I’m more scared by a headless confederation of teatards, millionaires, and business interests.
Keith
Give ’em one more bad election cycle, and they’ll be feasting on each others’ entrails.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Somebody ought to make a movie. Night of the Headless Teatards.
EJ
A circular firing squad of unreasonable extremists, business interests, and eccentric rich folks? Reminds me of some other party…
Just Some Fuckhead
But not your children, credit card or country.
Violet
Why? Not trying to be contrary or anything. Just genuinely curious.
Seems to me that a headless organization won’t have the discipline of the Republicans of old. One thing you could always count on with Republicans is that they could get people to fall in line. If they don’t have a leader, they’ll be lost. Without someone to tell them what to do, they’ll be flailing.
Who do you send your money to? Who do you listen to? Glenn Beck, who tells people he’s not a Republican and declares anyone to the left of Attila the Hun a Commie pinko? Or people like this PAC who are all about the money? Or Sarah Palin, who is all about her? How’s that gang going to get themselves together?
Napoleon
Huh? I am not. The reason they have been successful in the past is the amazing degree of unity/message discipline they have had. The best thing that could happen is to become headless.
Martin
@EJ: Hey, Dems outnumber GOP almost 2:1 on party identification. If the GOP can become as dysfunctional and self-destructive as the Dems, we’ll be sitting on 70 senate seats in November.
Wag
…it’s scientific.
But the know-nothings in the GOP don’t understand entropy
JGabriel
So the Republican party is cutting off its central leadership organization to spite its chairman* because they’re too chickenshit to fire a black man due to their own record of racial hostility, and yet “everyone” expects them to take control of Congress in the 2012 elections?
I mean, I knew the Fox Party was rudderless, but now they’ve got no prow either. They’re just gonna raft their way to the top.
Ooh, this is gonna be a fun election.
(The GOP responds: “It’s NOT cutting off our nose to spite our face! It’s just … plastic surgery!”)
.
Jeff
Hard to say– but my feeling is that the tsunami of cash that the millionaires and businessmen generate will largely be frittered away.
JGabriel
@EJ:
Zooey Deschanel is “eccentric rich folk”. Cheney, Scaife, Mellon, Koch, Murdoch, and Ailes, are all more accurately described as “evil rich bastards”.
.
mgordon1
I think “teatard” is my new favorite word.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
This is why I chuckle at the hopeful cries from the wingnuts that a dem apocalypse is coming this November. They will likely win back some red districts and pick up a fair number of seats generally in the House and a few in the senate, but maybe very few.
They are riding a short wave right now, some from the anxiety voters are having over HCR and the outrageous lying the wingers did on that, and mostly from the lack of jobs being produced by the recovering economy.
But that is all really, though continuing racial anxiety among whites is disconcerting, but not surprising, and every time Obama takes to the bully pulpit, he calms that anxiety a little more.
And when and if, though looking up, jobs keep on going up like last month, and people learning daily a little more that Obamacare isn’t going to kill them, but make it so their current insurance is more secure and they have better weapons to fight insurance industry abuses, the wingnuts will have nothing. Other than the even lower poll numbers their scorched earth politicking on Obama has brought them, they have nothing.
They do have the Lernaean Hydra the GOP has become. And with an emboldened Tea Party putting up third way candidates in primaries that will divide and conquer them even more when the crazies go up against dems in general elections. And that’s not to mention some expected third party candidates in the GE.
The party machinery is too chicken to fire their first AA RNC chairman, who is largely out of control, and attacking his own party as much as dems these days, so the funding will largely fall on outside groups and via the United case will produce a gazillion ads depicting Obama as the anti christ witchdoctor, among other insane memes.
It’s going to be quite a summer and fall. We will all need Gallagher sheets for all the smashed wingnut watermellon parts coming our way.
Origuy
Things fall apart, but the centre has been lost a long time ago. Yeats thought he’d seen anarchy. Just wait.
kansi
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
I’ll pay the extra to see this in 3D!
kid bitzer
question is, will it still be organized at grover norquist’s salon?
because the outsourcing to fox did not change the essentially top-down structure. (that’s why rove is *on* fox; he and norquist coordinate things together).
my guess is that we are not seeing real dissolution or fragmentation. we are just seeing a one-time, tactical side-step in order to dump steele.
and this maneuver is being coordinated from the top, from rove and norquist and their allies, just as usual.
centralized coordination is too deep in the republican dna. they don’t fall in love; they fall in line.
Cat Lady
The Republicans have been headless since Rove stopped faxing the daily talking points from central command. I remember watching one of those ridiculous CNN panels after either one of the debates or right after the election, and the panelists were forced to think on their feet, and whaddya know, they weren’t spewing GOP talking points. It didn’t last long though, as Rush and Beck stepped into the void. Their authoritarian nature demands that there be a bwana.
Violet
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Looking forward to hearing the first wingnut scream, “Release the Kraken!”
maus
What’s the difference? It’s all a balance of morons and industry-sponsored “thinktanks”, anyway. New formula, same as the old formula.
Alex S.
Michael Steele doesn’t want to go, so they’re working around him. And well, isn’t it the usual thing for a company to do, to outsource everything but the very essential (marketing)? The free market continues to devour the GOP.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Divide and conquer, that’s one way to win a war. The best part is that they are dividing and trying to conquer themselves. Who needs an enemy when you are your own worst one?
All we need to do is watch the show and give the merry-go-round a shove whenever it slows down.
robertdsc
@mgordon1:
Same.
PaulW
ZOMG the Democratic Party is eating itself! Rebellion! RUIN! NO MORE LIBERAL ELITES!
This is all good for the Whig Party.
Desargues
But, if there is any truth that “divide et impera” is a good strategy, this ought to work out well for Democrats.
Republicans will regroup, I suppose. Maybe in a few years. It did take them about eight years to regroup after Goldwater, didn’t it?
Or maybe they’ll just go the way of the Whig Party.
daryljfontaine
@Wag:
Check out Mr. Businessman.
D
Keith G
Doug, you give rise to an interesting question (to me anyway) that I will try to give voice to:
Historically, who has led the Republican Party? It seems to me that their track record a strong single person leadership is not at clear as one might think. They have a history of tough intercene battles.
50s – Taft, Ike – but Ike was hands off and not “pure”
60s Goldwater tried – was he a leader or a vision?
60s, 70s – Nixon – but Dick was all about Dick (and not in a good way).
Mid 70s Reagan begins to make his move and stays Rex for a decade. The Golden Age of Post War GOP leadership.
Late 80s to now – 41 was a placeholder, Dole Kemp, Newt, and other were nudging each other for control, 43 wasn’t a leader as much as an opportunist who got lucky.
So other than Ronnie who has been a strong singular leader of the GOP since the 1950s?
Midnight Marauder
@kid bitzer:
I just think there are too many rifts in the Republican Party that are inevitably in the process of exploding open right now to think the fragmentation isn’t genuine. Just look at how the GOP’s message discipline instantly fell apart after the Affordable Care Act finally past. They haven’t been able to find any kind of coherent message on how they’re going to a) completely repeal the ACA; b) “repeal and replace” everything in the ACA except for the “good parts” (naturally); or c) just face up to the fact that the ACA isn’t going to be repealed ever. They’re calling for Sen. Bob Corker’s head just because he had the audacity to say about repeal of the ACA, “The fact is that’s not going to happen, OK?”
Not to mention all the reports that came out after the ACA passed about Republicans in both the House, but especially the Senate, who who like to have voted for the bill, but couldn’t because of the pressure within their caucus to stand firm against it. Well, look at what good that did for them. Now, Chuck Grassley is out there trying to tell people about the good things he added to that apocalypse of a health care reform bill. Republicans have no real cohesion going into the next round of battles of financial reform. Their only real energy policy has been snatched away from them by President Obama, and all they’re left with is “NO, WE NEED TO DRILL MORE!” Yeah, good luck with that one.
That famed centralized coordination started unraveling a while ago, and it’s only going to get worse as more and more Republicans get closer to their primary. These people are going to fucking eat each other alive before it’s all said and done.
EDIT: Not to mention what happens if, and when, the RNC inevitably fires Michael Steel. If you think the guy is out of control right now, just wait until he’s been forced out as the Republican Party’s Executive Black Guy, and is making the rounds of every and any
newsshow that will have him. He’ll be decrying how Republicans can’t handle a black man with power, which will work out just great for them, what with the POTUS still being a black guy and all.Toast
“Teatards”! Outstanding. Gods, why didn’t that occur to me ages ago?
flavortext
Hey, corporations are just cutting out the middle man. Pretty soon they’ll just abandon this whole give money to parties and PACs thing altogether, and then voters can vote directly for Senator McEmployee (Walmart-AR). Then you can call your member of Congress a corporate whore and it won’t even be rhetorical! It’s a win-win for everybody!
tbogg
They paid to advertise on The Daily Caller? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to call Tucker’s mom?
kay
@Midnight Marauder:
I don’t know. As far as fundraising, more and varied appeals mean more money. It’s all going to the same place, despite what they say, essentially.
If a spin-off group raises some, that goes to individual Republican candidates who meet the fake fiscal conservatism requirements, and then Steele just allocates his a little differently, to GOTV, state parties, etc.
What if they come out ahead? The RNC does decently, and all these fake-outrage spin-offs are just more and varied appeals to donors who may have been disaffected anyway?
It’s a new pitch, and if it’s directed to specific donors, it could benefit the whole horrible gigantic enterprise.
It sounds like bullshit to me. Like they’re denouncing the wasteful spending of Steele in order to raise more money, so Steele can allocate his a little differently.
kid bitzer
@27–
i’d love to have you be right. hell, i’ll even buy you the popcorn.
M. Carey
They believe in privatization. Did it with Foreign Policy during Iran-Contra; with military in Iraq and Afghanistan; why not with the Party itself ??
Comrade Dread
Fixed.
Texas Dem
I hate to cite a Tom Friedman column, but he’s right about one thing: Many of the rifts that are opening up in the GOP were created by globalization. The corporate and business wing of the GOP knows that we need to focus our attention on infrastructure, education, and immigration if we are to succeed in the 21st century, but the tea party base of the GOP doesn’t believe in any of those things. All that holds them together is support for low taxes, and low tax rates are not sustainable given our indebtedness. So a break-up is inevitable.
Midnight Marauder
@kay:
I don’t know if more and varied appeals means more money. Based on the reading I’ve done so far, it would appear that a lot of Republicans and “conservatives” who are fed up with the RNC are looking to reroute their money elsewhere, not set up another line of support for the national organization they’re increasingly become disillusioned with. You’ve got Republican donors talking about how they can round up $50 million to start their own “shadow RNC” essentially, and do it for the upcoming midterms.
I understand the point about certain money going to specific candidates, and then the national organization simply redirecting its money in a supplemental and supportive fashion. But that also presupposes that the RNC actually has the respect and credibility within Republican circles to pull that off, and that there are high-ranking Republicans who not only like Michael Steele, but also can work constructively with him. We’re talking about someone in Michael Steele who openly insinuates that high-ranking Republican officials and lawmakers are generally uncomfortable with him because he’s black. I mean, Alex Castellanos (perennial CNN hack and slimy Republican operative) was hired late last year by the RNC to help reform Steele’s image and now the guy is on CNN saying,
I just don’t think that the currently inflamed tensions within the Republican Party are “fake outrages” by any means, and that it’s only going to get progressively worse for them as the midterms wear on. And if the plan was to denounce Steele’s “wasteful spending,” only to simply raise more money for other Republican groups, then that might take the cake as the stupidest plan the party has unveiled to date. Not only are they being dramatically outraised by the DNC, but their cash-on-hand supply has dwindled substantially before the major action of the 2010 midterms has even started. If this was their big plan to increase funding for the party and get themselves back on the right track to taking over Congress…wow. It is absolutely failtastic.
kay
@Midnight Marauder:
I think it’s directed to two different groups. The regular 25 dollar donors probably don’t know a thing about the scandal. They get direct mail postage paid envelopes and they write a check.
The big donors are aware, and offended (no one wants to look like a sucker) so they get this tailor-made appeal to smooth ruffled feathers.
That way they’re not giving to that mismanaged RNC. No sir, they’re giving to this “independent” organization.
What’s the difference? It’s all going to electing Republicans.
Splitting Image
As I’ve said before, the Republicans are heading into 1982 on their way to 1984. The new fundraising system may be helpful in getting individual Republicans elected across the country, since different PACs can focus on issues pertinent to each region of the country, but the RNC is necessary to stitch the demands of each wing of the party into a coherent platform.
A lot of people have pointed out that “bipartisanship” between the Democrats and Republicans is a fool’s game because the parties have very different ideas about how the country should be run. The same is true of the corporate, religious and libertarian factions of the G.O.P. The same decline in civility that makes it impossible for Democrats to get G.O.P. support for even the most moderate initiatives will do the same for the Republicans’ ability to build a consensus if they ever do get back in power.
And I think the Republicans may already be past the point where the party as constituted cannot get 270 votes in a Presidential election. They’re in complete denial about it, but they’re there.
WereBear
Seems to me that all the RNC spending on booze, dancers, and fancy duds is putting money back into the economy.
aimai
I wish it were tea-maggedon but I’m not so sure. As far as I can see its just opening a floodgate to more money. Of course, if history is any guide we will see a ton of that money siphoned off to every plausible rogue. Its not like the rich buisness guys are any smarter about money and politics than anyone else (viz: various self funded losers). So maybe I am optimistic that most of the money will be wasted. Yes…yes…I think I am. Let the teamaggedon begin.
aimai
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Well, yea. And to keep the bugfuck crazy at least slightly in check. America, or white majority America, will, and have let the wingnuts have longer rope to hang themselves with, than they do democrats. But there is a limit to that, at least I hope there is, and even the pale tribe will recoil if even some of the tea bag message we see in their protest signs gets onto their teevee sets.
If they don’t recoil, then we are all fucked anyways, and this country can start tearing down it’s statues of past greatness, cause we will be headed for the dustbin of history.
Undercover FBI Agent DougJ
Why? Not trying to be contrary or anything. Just genuinely curious.
The old Republican party had the potential to produce decent presidents — Bush I for example. This headless thing will only produce Palins
Splitting Image
@Undercover FBI Agent DougJ:
Producing Nominee Palin and producing President Palin are two different things, and the Republicans may just have to find out the hard way how different they are.
mclaren
A decentralized leaderless group of dangerous potentially violent extremists who hate us for our freedom…
Al Qaeda?
No, the new Republican party…
LarryB
John, Not decentralized, just outsourced. Now that the corp’s have been given legal cover for unlimited donations, they no longer need the RNC. With the Trust PAC (gotta love that name – it’s soo Jay Gould) the Right People can call the shots directly without having to deal with the yahoos.
slippy
@JGabriel: Epic win. I think this analysis is spot-on. There were always two conflicting impulses to the GOP: #1, find a way to thwart the true will of America in order to fleece her inhabitants. #2, find a way to make America accept this nonetheless by appealing to the tribalistic tendencies of the most reactionary amongst us. #2 has gotten a lot harder and more complicated as the demographics have expanded beyond the racist core that the Republicans mobilized under Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
Having embedded several token minorities into their leadership structure, the GOP are now stuck — if they dump Steele they will make it plain to even the lowest-information voters that their focus is strictly white-bread America. But if they don’t, the base abandons them anyway because it is in the depths of a purity purge which is reinforced by each electoral loss and shoves them further out of the mainstream.
It’s a feedback loop and I believe it will destroy the Republicans. Probably over the next 2-3 election cycles they will become completely impotent.
I have this other idea that a New Left is forming out of the grassroots and that the Democrats are going to step into the conservative void left by the Republican Party’s abandonment of the concept of loyal opposition over the last generation. We will have two parties, but the Democrats are going to become the new GOP and someone else will become the new Liberal party.
I’ve been projecting this for some time now (I started when Bush was [s]elected in 200) and so far the death spiral of the GOP has not abated in the slightest. I didn’t imagine the Tea Party but now that I’m watching it it seems obviously the next step; you spend a generation dog-whistling to your extremist base and they finally get aggravated and start demanding results.