Here's some good news for Democrats who've
been blue lately: The coming GOP congressional surge will
inevitably lead to a lot of disarray on the right. There
will be infighting, bickering and charges of betrayal
aplenty. The tea-infused populists will bark at — and
sometimes bite - the so-called elitists. Many in the
Republican establishment will, in turn, show no small
amount of ingratitude to the populists who breathed new
life into it.
Now,
this might seem like cold comfort to those liberals who
actually believed their own hype about President Obama
ushering in what Time magazine called a "new liberal
order" that was supposed to last a generation but began
petering out when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate
seat.
So if
liberals will take no solace from this prediction, perhaps
conservatives will. You wouldn't know it from much of the
mainstream news media coverage, which has focused almost
entirely on the tea parties and the GOP, but the 2010
midterms were never about the Republicans. Think about how
much coverage you've seen of Delaware Senate candidate
Christine O'Donnell or New York gubernatorial contender
Carl Paladino, two candidates who were always long shots
at best. Now think how little you've seen of say, Ron
Johnson, the Wisconsin rookie politician who defeated Russ
Feingold, the progressive lion of the Senate now that
Teddy Kennedy is gone. Johnson is a solid, serious,
candidate and hence bad copy for a press corps at least in
part eager to keep the attention off the Democrats.
In
short, as John Podhoretz recently wrote in the New York
Post, this election isn't so much a coronation for the
Republicans as it is a vote of no confidence in the
Democrats. The political turmoil on the right, most
commonly understood as the tea parties versus the
establishment, that we've witnessed over the last year was
in many respects a sideshow compared with the fact that
support of Obama and the Democrats among independents,
moderate Republicans, the elderly and, most recently,
among women and low-income families, has cratered. Last
week's New York Times/CBS News poll found that for the
first time since 1982, when polling began, the GOP has the
edge among women. For the most part, the bulk of these
voters aren't moving to the GOP so much as they are
fleeing the Democrats.
And that
is why the Republicans are going to start turning on each
other. It's the nature of politics that when you're out of
power, everyone can agree on what the top priority should
be: Get back in power. But, the only way to get back in
power is to attract people who might not share all of your
goals. Majority coalitions by definition have diverse
groups within them. FDR's coalition had everybody from
Klansmen to blacks, socialists to industrialists. The new
GOP coalition isn't nearly so exotic, but it does have its
internal contradictions.
We've
had a preview of them in the Delaware primary fight
between O'Donnell and Michael Castle. O'Donnell partisans
hold that inside-the-Beltway Republicans refused to rally
to a right-wing stalwart. O'Donnell's conservative critics
insist that they are no less sincere in their principles;
they simply thought O'Donnell was a risky choice compared
with the comparative sure bet the GOP had in Castle to
take Joe Biden's seat.
The
populist vs. establishment storyline is going to come back
with a vengeance, particularly given the crowded field of
potential GOP presidential contenders. Sarah Palin and
Mike Huckabee won't be the only ones writing off criticism
from Karl Rove or George Will as "inside the Beltway
elitism."
More
important than the intraconservative fights is the fact
that the moderates, independents, women and young people
fleeing the Obama coalition to make up a new Republican
majority aren't much interested in lending their weight to
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's agenda to make
Obama a "one-term president." Much like the tea partiers,
they would like to see the GOP accomplish something
substantive over the next two years. The arguing begins
the second the GOP starts acting on that substance.
