TONY BURMAN
To save itself, the Tea Party is turning to suicide,
What Al Qaeda didn’t quite accomplish on Sept. 11, 2001, the Tea Party insurgency in the United States Congress appears determined to complete. By shutting down the U.S government this week and threatening to plunge its economy into default later this month, America’s band of political suicide bombers — aided and abetted by the wider Republican Party — has exposed that country’s democracy to incalculable international ridicule and damage. If Osama bin Laden were still alive, his head would be spinning.
Former president Bill Clinton said it right in an interview he gave last weekend: “Can you remember a time . . . when a major political party was just sitting around, begging for Americans to fail?”
As this week’s shutdown approached, there was something utterly surreal about Republican complaints that the White House was able to open a dialogue with Iran but not with them.
As satirist Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, replied: “If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hardline, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world, but not with the Republicans, maybe he’s not the problem.”
So far, it appears the American people agree. A Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday showed that Americans overwhelmingly oppose efforts by congressional Republicans to shut down the federal government as a way of stopping Obama’s signature health-care law from being implemented. The margin was 72 to 22 per cent.
Even though Obama’s Affordable Care Act was voted in by Congress, signed into law by the president and endorsed as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Tea Party rebellion against it has intensified. And their opposition has been lavishly bankrolled by the billionaires who want to turn government into a very small, powerless presence in American society.
In U.S. media coverage this week, a common narrative was the public’s growing exasperation with Washington and its apparent inability to “get along.” But there is actually no mystery to this. This is not about politicians acting like “children” or “crazy” political forces careening out of control.
To the warring factions, this is very serious business. The battle not only affects the integrity of America’s government: with today’s polarized politics, how is the popular will expressed and protected? But it may well shape its future.
The Tea Party claims, dishonestly, that its opposition to Obamacare reflects widespread public anxiety about the program.
In fact, the American public has been largely split about the merits of the new health-care law, and woefully uninformed.
The Tea Party actually has a larger worry. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has emerged as one of its most important leaders, confessed that last July in an intimate interview with a fellow conservative on Fox News.
Rather than believing that Obamacare will prove to be a failure, his worry is that it will be a success: “If we don’t (defund Obamacare) now, in all likelihood, Obamacare will never, ever be repealed. Why is that? Because on Jan. 1 . . . the subsidies kick in . . . Their plan is to get the American people addicted to the sugar, addicted to the subsidies, and once that happens, in all likelihood, it never gets (repealed).”
This is the Tea Party’s worst nightmare, which could also prove fatal to the future of the Republican party: Will Obamacare become such a popular government program that it reinforces the often tenuous link between the American people and their government?
In a more immediate political sense, the Democrats are now thinking what was once unthinkable.
If the U.S. can emerge from these crises relatively intact, will Americans turn against the Republicans in the elections next year and bring back the Democrats as the majority party in the House of Representatives?
The odds are still against such a dramatic shakeup in the U.S. Congress, but this chapter is still being written. And the Democrats’ biggest asset is the array of inept and extreme forces they have as their political opponents.
Republican Sen. John McCain once called the Tea Party leadership, including Cruz, “wacko birds.” And California Republican congressman Devin Nunes called them “lemmings with suicide vests.”
We shall have to wait and see what final judgment they receive from the beleaguered American public.
Obamacare’s promise pushes Republican ‘suicide’ strategy
Tony Burman, former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News, teaches journalism at Ryerson University. tony.burman@gmail.com