Think Progress has compiled an enlightening list of all the primary races they could find where a defeated Republican has failed to endorse the winner. Almost every case involves a Tea Party candidate vs. an Establishment candidate, although both sides have come out on top. It has been a brutal primary season for the Republicans, and not just in the high profile cases involving dispatched incumbents. If the past is prologue, I think we can see where this is going. Here are some excerpts from Linda Killian’s wonderful 1998 book: The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?
First, there’s the similar lack of focus on actual policy and the nuts and bolts of legislating:
So much of went wrong with the 104th Congress came down to the fact that the Republicans just hadn’t given any thought to how they were going to run things once they took over. They came up with a nifty campaign plan, some good slogans and buzzwords, some basic tenets about balancing the budget and cutting government. But Gingrich and company had no real game plan for what came next. They were making it up as they went along…
…Gingrich had focused for so many years on the struggle of overthrowing the Democrats that he hadn’t paid too much attention to how a bill becomes a law. It isn’t by one party in one house in one branch of government attempting to dictate its will to everyone else.
In a way, this same criticism can applied to a lot of progressives who struggled so long to overthrow the Republicans only to discover that Washington still knows how to prevent substantial change. But it is the current crop of radical Republicans who are going to find themselves in a familiar tussle when they get to Washington next year.
Gingrich may have been impatient with the freshmen’s stubbornness, but he understood that he held the Speakership because of them, and he knew that to hold on to it the freshmen would have to keep their seats…
…Gingrich may have wondered what kind of genie he had unleashed by empowering the freshmen, but it was too late to shove them back in the bottle. When Ross Perot announced in August that he planned to form a third party, Gingrich quipped that he already had a third party in the House: “It’s called the freshmen class.”
A lot of the class of 1994 is still around in DC, but now they are the Establishment. They may recognize earlier versions of themselves in next year’s class.
These Republican freshmen were different from any that had come before them; they were different from senior members of their own party. For one thing, [Rep. Van] Hilleary and his classmates were considerably younger. Almost 60 percent of them had not yet turned forty-five. They were a new generation. The first Republican president of their adult lives was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a God to them, a religion. He represented a shining example of what the Republican Party should stand for. Most of them would say without hesitation that he was one of the finest presidents in history.
Never mind that they had arrived in Washington specifically to fix the mess that Ronald Reagan had begun, with his tax cuts, military spending on steroids, and unchecked government growth. It was under Reagan that the federal deficit first hit $200 billion. But never mind that. It was what Reagan represented, not what he really was, that they loved- that clean-cut, gung-ho, America-first, pro-business, shining-city-on-a-hill thing he had going. They loved it because that was who they who they were, too. They did seem much angrier than Reagan ever was, though. And louder.
Obviously, we’ve been through this before. A two-term Republican president creates massive deficits which he leaves to a Democratic successor. Conservatives go crazy about the deficit once their guy is no longer in power. A riled-up base elects a bunch of whack-a-doodles to Congress who feel like they are on some kind of messianic mission to tear apart the federal government. Let’s just hope Obama isn’t getting any extracurricular fellatio, cuz we know how that’ll turn out.
