I never get tired of reading Republicans-in-disarray articles, and today Stu Rothenberg feeds my monkey. He spends most of his time arguing that Karl Rove made a mistake announcing his anti-Tea Party crusade in the Northeast Establishment New York Times and that he’d be better off co-opting the wingnuts than confronting them. His conclusion, however, is that not much can be done about the problem because there is no easy solution to a political base that is infused with so much hatred and paranoia.
Ultimately, the Republican Party’s problems go back to its base voters, who participate in primaries and nominating conventions. Many of them are so blinded by their anger toward President Barack Obama, the national news media and their own party leaders that they are willing to nominate the most conservative candidate in a primary, no matter how limited his or her appeal in a general election.
And for party strategists, there is no easy solution to that problem.
I have an idea. I don’t think it is very hard to implement. How about Establishment Republicans stop feeding the Crazy to the Stupid?
How could that be done? Well, the management at Fox News could make some decisions about what kind of information they want the Republican base to have. Do they want them more angry and paranoid, or less? Is the network about making money or giving power to the right? For a while, those two objectives were not in conflict. They seem to be in conflict today, however. As for politicians, they shouldn’t feed anger and paranoia to the base if they don’t want them to behave like wingnuts. That means that they should stop appearing on some hate radio shows and that they should disavow some of them.
There is a certain sense in which the Republican Party relies on anger and paranoia, but we can all see that it has gone way too far in the Obama Era.