Eugene Robinson makes a point:
[Jim] DeMint has gone so far as to make a campaign swing through the South and the Midwest, whipping up support among the GOP base. Asked by an audience member in Arkansas why Congress should pass a bill starving Obamacare when everyone knows Obama would never sign it, DeMint replied, “Well, we don’t know that, do we?”
Come on. We know.
And we also know that painting Obamacare as the end of America as we know it is an effective way for DeMint to rebrand Heritage, moving it away from mainstream Republican orthodoxy into tea party la-la land. Noisemaking and fundraising go hand in hand; this crazy exercise promises to be very bad for the GOP, but it might end up being very good for the Heritage Foundation’s coffers.
I’m not so sure about the health of the coffers. It is not my impression that Washington think tanks survive mainly on the support of small donors. Just looking at the New America Foundation‘s funding page, it appears that they rely on very big donors like Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and a variety of private and corporate interests. The Heritage Foundation does appear to aggressively court small donors, though, so perhaps they can afford to lose a million dollar donor here and there by going full TeaTard.
Not all oligarchs think the same way. Some of them are high on their own supply, but most want the government to pay its bills and not resemble a psychiatric patient. In the end, intentionally going nuts to increase small donor revenue may be no better than revenue-neutral. I wouldn’t bet on Jim DeMint to have a winning business strategy.
