I don’t know how the whole debt limit crisis will shake out. I suspect that McConnell’s kabuki will prevail. Regardless, I can already see some fallout for the Republicans. The party has been rent in two. A precursor of this was seen when Rand Paul defeated Mitch McConnell’s preferred candidate to replace Jim Bunning in the Senate. It showed that even at the very top of the Republican Party, the Establishment had lost control of their base. It took a while for this to manifest itself in a way that will have negative consequences for the party, but that time has come. Speaker Boehner is either an empty husk or a smoking crater. Pick your simile, but his leadership position is pretty much destroyed. Minority Leader McConnell is still alive and kicking, but by forcing the Republicans to eat their peas, he’s not going to be popular.
The problem obviously extends to the presidential primaries. The Establishment has been unable to find an alternative to Mitt Romney, and they need a champion now who can stand up against the Tea Party movement and defend Wall Street. But that’s probably not going to happen. What’s worse is that all the presidential candidates will probably spend the next year making incoherent arguments about the debt that are more properly aimed at the Tea Party that scuttled the president’s effort to achieve a grand bargain to tackle the debt problem.
Insofar as reality is acknowledged at all, the Republican candidates will argue that Congress is filled with insufficiently radical politicians. In other words, the GOP will be campaigning against themselves. This really is beginning to be reminiscent of 1964.
Now, a lot of people have been saying that things are shaping up a lot like 1948, when the Republican nominee was far to the left of the Republican-led Congress. In that election, President Truman ignored that fact and ran against the Do-Nothing Congress that couldn’t get anything done. It worked. But I don’t think Romney has really positioned himself far to the left of Congress. And even if he had been doing that, I don’t think he could continue to do it and have any hope of winning the nomination.
For a long time, the Republicans’ most notable feature has been their unflinching unity. Those days are over.
