Republican leadership a victim of its own rhetoric
As the leading Republican presidential candidates rave about deporting 11 million immigrants, fighting some kind of world war against Islam, implementing gimmicky tax plans that would bankrupt the nation, keep one thing in mind: The party establishment brought this plague upon itself.
The self-harming was unintentional but inevitable. Donald Trump and Ben Carson didn’t come out of nowhere. Fully half of the party’s voters didn’t wake up one morning and decide experience as a Republican elected official was the last thing they wanted in a presidential candidate.
The insurrection that has reduced Jeb Bush to single-digit support while Trump and Carson soar is an understandable reaction of the jilted. Republican leaders have spent the years of the Obama presidency inflaming GOP base voters with rhetoric and empty promises. The establishment won its goal — electoral gains in Congress and many statehouses — but in the process may have lost the party.
Unrest was brewing among conservatives even before Barack Obama took office as the first African-American president. George W. Bush had angered the base with his budgetbusting expenditures for Middle East wars and a new prescription drug benefit under Medicare. What about the party’s commitment to fiscal responsibility?
The final straw for many came with the financial crisis in 2008, when Bush, in his final days, won a massive bailout for big Wall Street banks. The wholesale violation of conservative principles helped launch the tea party movement.
With the economy still in crisis, Obama took actions that further riled conservatives — pushing through Congress a messy economic stimulus package and rescuing General Motors and Chrysler. And then the president won passage of the Affordable Care Act.
The GOP saw a golden political opportunity. Rather than work with Obama toward compromise, Republicans positioned themselves as implacable foes of the president.
As the tea party increasingly demonized Obama for being an alleged Muslim or socialist — and delegitimized him as supposedly having been born in Kenya — the Republican establishment shamefully played along despite knowing this was rubbish. The result was a sweeping victory in the 2010 election. Republicans captured the House by electing dozens of tea party-backed candidates, who came to Washington with revolu- tion on their minds. Experienced GOP politicians who should have known better allowed this insurgency to push the party into a series of showdowns with Obama Republicans could not win. Having told the base that great things could be accomplished by shutting down the government or threatening default on the national debt, the establishment had to say, in effect, never mind. Voters began to realize that they’d been had. Are voters who have been on the raucous, anything-goes Trump bandwagon for months going to fall meekly in line behind someone like Bush or Marco Rubio? It gets harder to imagine such a thing. Meanwhile, the field is being pulled so far to the right on issues such as immigration and taxes that any of the likely nominees will have a hard time winning the general election. This is a fine mess the Republican Party has made, and we won’t know until the early primaries whether there’s any way out.