The headline is misleading, but I get what Reid Wilson is saying. For Republican governors who are thinking of running for president, the government shutdown offers them an opportunity to be a little above the fray. They can badmouth Washington in general terms, which is always popular on both sides of the aisle. And they can point out that their governments are open for business.
But I don’t think the government shutdown actually helps these governors’ chances of winning the presidency. And it isn’t going to help Tom Corbett win reelection in Pennsylvania or Rick Snyder in Michigan.
Ground zero is obviously Virginia, where so many people work for the federal government. Open up an Electoral College Calculator and try to find a path to victory for the GOP that doesn’t involve them winning Virginia. (Hint: if the Dems win Virginia in 2016, they can cede Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Florida and still win the election with 272 votes). Anything that damages the GOP brand in Virginia should be of the utmost concern to any potential Republican candidate for the presidency in 2016.
As Dan Balz documents in this morning’s Washington Post, the country is growing increasingly polarized, which means that there are lot of areas of the country where the people think what the Republicans are doing makes some kind of sense. Northern Virginia is not one of those places. The Philly suburbs are not one of those places.
In my opinion, the shutdown is increasing polarization on a lop-sided battlefield that favors the Democrats on the presidential level. It will increase passions on both sides, but the only movement from one party to the other will come from people in the middle who will be alarmed at the financial brinksmanship of the Republicans or who have directly detrimental experiences as a result of the shutdown.
It isn’t good news for Republican gubernatorial candidates who are running for election or re-election in blue states, and it isn’t good news for whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
It’s also creating real stressors on the Republican coalition because they have quite a few representatives who are serving in states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California that are culturally alienated from the ObamaCare revolt and whose base is centered in the financial industry. These seats, along with the ones the GOP holds in Virginia, will be the ones that become vulnerable and that could fall if the backlash is severe enough.
On the whole, the shutdown isn’t doing the Republicans any favors, which is one main reason why the Democrats aren’t too worried about it lasting a while.
Been hearing this for decades. This country has always been “polarized.” The issues defining the poles shift and morph over time, but the divide at any one point in time doesn’t change that much. It remains 40% to 60% against or for and vice versa.
How do we explain this anti-federal government spending employee:
We explain it the same way we explain Massachusetts public employees voting for “Prop 2 1/2” in 1980, knowing it would mean they’d lose their jobs. People have other self-interests in addition to their economic self-interests.
I guess some people must have inverted Maslow’s Hierarchy pyramids, or are in a heavy state of denial, as in an exception will be made in my case.
I’ve known people like that. There’s a certain type of Republican or libertarian engineer or other kind of technical person, or maybe an attorney, that really is puzzling. You see them performing ably in a field that requires some degree of intelligence, and you wonder how they can be so obtuse about the government. My current theory is that if you embrace libertarian views you’re not likely to learn any rigor in your thinking. One of the central things is this cult of the individual, the sovereign citizen, so you don’t need anybody telling you what’s what.
And it can be worse if you’ve mastered a field, such as law or engineering, that does require some rigor, because these guys then start to feel like they’ve mastered all of human endeavor and they just understand how things work better than you do.
Well an engineer probably DOES understand who things work better than I do. But that still doesn’t mean their solutions are correct and not based on ideology.
And you can’t forget, if we have any hope of standing up to tech surveillance it will have to rely on the tech culture of the country with it’s strong libertarian overtones.
Booman Tribune ~ It’s Not Always Good News for Republicans
It may not help Republican Governors win the Presidency, but it may do them no harm winning re-election in red states. Republican politics now isn’t about winning the Presidency, it is about warding off tea party challengers in red states and gerrymandered guaranteed Republican majority districts. The Republicans are becoming a neo-secessionist party, and thus winning in Washington is only part of the battle. The main battle is about maintaining the unity and cohesion of the the secessionist tea party. This is the civil war all over again albeit in a new guise. Bullets and bombs may win wars, they don’t necessarily change hearts and minds. Dems are trying to maintain the fiction that there is one USA with a united people and common aims. It ain’t necessarily so… all the objections to Obamacare aren’t on the merits, they are based on the fact that it represents a proposal to extend Federal power made by the other side.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8GuMRxk5TU (Stephanopoulos interviews Beohner on debt ceiling)
I’m really hoping the administration is secretly planning to mint a platinum coin or invoke the fourteenth amendment or whatever they have to, if Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Of course it’s the right thing for them to say it’s not going to happen in order to keep the pressure on Republicans, but I hope they’re lying. I’m not at all confident Boehner is going to back down. As much as I’ve disagreed with the Republican party in the past, I’ve never thought of them as the party of traitors, as I do now. They’re literally willing to threaten to destroy the country if they don’t get their way.
Yeah, well it’s not so simple.
Basically, we’re just waiting for the naive 45+ year olds to either stop voting, or stop breathing.
And we just gave them free healthcare…
/snark
A front-page story in today’s New York Times provides the background to the shutdown within the GOP, and it is a real eye-opener.
The story is call “A Crisis Months on the Planning”. It reveals in great detail that this fiasco was planned at the top levels of the party, including former Attorney General Edward Meese. (I didn’t even know that guy was still alive.)
If you put this together with the obvious discomfort these tactics are causing many in the party, anger at Ted Cruz, etc., you can only conclude that THE GOP IS ALREADY SPLIT FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. It is no small bunch of hillbillies running this thing, and not Ted Cruz either, they are just the useful idiots.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/us/a-federal-budget-crisis-months-in-the-planning.html?_r=0
But the split is deeply ambiguous. For years the GOP has nurtured this lunacy in order to win elections. You hear McCain, Rove, and many other old-timers complaining bitterly, most GOP senators not supporting it, and I think we can say that most of the Republican legislators in Washington are not happy.
We now get a clearer idea of where the lines are drawn. For example, if McCain hates Ted Cruz, then you would think he must hate this entire Koch activist movement. Yet even now when the lunatics have practically taken over the asylum, there doesn’t seem to be any organized opposition to it within the party.
It reminds me of a critique I read some time ago of moderate American Zionists, which pointed out that although they themselves were by no means extremists, they provided crucial aid and cover to the real extremists by continuing to fund them and never openly criticizing them. Fortunately, that situation has changed a lot over the last several years, and one of the main reasons has been the successful entry of JStreet as a counterweight to AIPAC. There is no equivalent to JStreet in the GOP.
Even in a Daily Beast story, “Republican Donors Revolt Against Government Shutdown”, I don’t see anything remotely resembling a revolt, especially when you compare it to the precision-targeted takeover of the GOP precinct by precinct by the Koch mafia. What I see a bunch of rich, complacent, ill-informed donors who have been fast asleep just beginning to open one eye say “Wha…? “
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/03/gop-donors-revolt-against-republican-led-government
-shutdown.html
Meanwhile the governors think they will benefit by differentiating themselves from the crazies. Rather than fight the already well-advanced split, they embrace it as offering a survival strategy. This is emblematic of the whole party, whose calculated use of the lunatic fringe has long since become the normal state of affairs, even now that the lunatic fringe is clearly using them.
What they haven’t factored in is that there’s a real cost. The Koch brothers, Club for Malignant Growth and others seem endlessly willing to pay those costs, but as we’ve seen, even massive money can buy only a limited amount of happiness.
Another corollary, the RW of the GOP is often compared to the LW’s destructive influence on the Democratic Party in the early 70s. We compare the DFH’s and the black liberationists of that day to the GOP mouth-breathers of today. But there is one big difference. The left radicals had no big money behind them, in fact they drove the money away.
What you have is an extremely well-funded fascist movement in this country that is limited by our democratic system on the national level and in blue or hopefully purple states, but which in the south and some other regions is succeeding on the state and local level.
I think many of our pundits, like Reid Wilson, are slow to grasp the implications. Surely you are right, Booman, that “the shutdown is increasing polarization on a lop-sided battlefield that favors the Democrats on the presidential level … the only movement from one party to the other will come from people in the middle who will be alarmed at the financial brinksmanship of the Republicans or who have directly detrimental experiences as a result of the shutdown.”
As long as our Democratic system can actually continue to function.
Great comment. However one word of caution. If big business donors do eventually break with the GOP they probably will not seek to form a new party: They will seek to take over the Dems instead. You do not want the Dems to become the party of the business establishment against small town and rural teabaggers however deluded they might be because then the Dems will become like the European social democrats – almost completely alienated from their working class base.
“They” have already captured half the Democratic Party. And that half has most of the power. Thus, increasing the power and reach of private health insurance companies was embraced as “progressive” and sold as health care.
Marie, I’ve been around long enough not to see connections between the Democratic Party and Wall street as anything new.
Of the recent capitalist parasiting off liberal goals, I am much more concerned about their commercialization of primary, secondary and higher education, than with the insurance industry and health care. Because the latter still represents a net improvement, whereas the former is a deleterious scam.
But as far as capitalism and the Democrats, even if the right wing regarded FDR as a socialist and worse, everybody knows he set out to save capitalism (from itself) — and succeeded.
We also know that in 2008 Wall Street made a considerable invested in Obama, but in 2012 they placed their bets on Rmoney — and lost. Proving once again that the bulk of Wall street types are not very politically astute.
I think a certain degree of alliance with Wall Street in strategically necessary at this time. But it is naturally checked by the growing populist movement within the Democratic Party, exemplified by people like Elizabeth Warren, Marcy Kaptur, Ron Wyden, Bill de Blasio, that is not going away. Maybe Cory Booker, the Castro brothers in Texas.
The decisive rejection of Larry Summers by both Democrats and Republicans (!) on the finance committee is another healthy sign.
Indeed since 2004, the Howard Dean revolution in the Democratic Party, I do not see the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party” fading away, but just the opposite.
I also know that there are a lot of rich people who genuinely share the goals of greater equality and opportunity for all, and they support the Democratic Party (something the sociopathic Republicans just cannot understand).
On the contrary, the Democratic populists are the very people who can develop genuine legislation, genuine regulation, to “save Wall Street from itself” if anybody can.
To that extent we really do have common cause with Wall Street in the sense that neither the Tea Party maniacs not their “moderate” enablers want to regulate, they are bomb-throwing nihilists who are uninterested in and incapable of actually developing sane policy and legislation.
Then there are real cultural differences. I just don’t believe it would ever occur to most of the Republican fat cats to support the Democrats. It goes against the grain. And could you imagine the likes of Karl Rove, McConnell, McCain, ever supporting Democrats?
In short, capitalist influence into the Democratic Party are explained by the following facts:
(a) the Democratic Party has always been capitalist, nothing new about that
(b) to a certain extent, the Democratic Party needs to work with Wall St., hopefully in a constructive way (e.g. regulation)
(c) given the historical constituencies of the Democrtic Party, there are various kinds of natural limits to how far Wall Street will embrace the Democrats.
In the long run, I think they will remain Republicans, the main thing is that they have to lose their complacency about the Tea Party. Once they did, they could easily thwart the Kochs. Maybe the latest episodes, and the frustrations of Republicans like McCain, Rove, etc., really will wake some of them up to get their house in order. They re so corrupt and compromised, it is hard to know where this leadership could come from, but they will have to do it.
Compare FDR’s speeches wrt Wall St. with Obama’s. FDR called them economic royalists and welcomed their hatred of himself. Obama says they deserve their riches and invites them to WH lunches and big shindigs.
Capitalism is inherently predatory, particularly in the financial services sector. Taming it is what led to decades of a more stable and healthier economy. Add in progressive taxation and income and wealth inequality declined. We got there with radical voices such as Walter Reuther and MLK, Jr. Elizabeth Warren is great but she’s a liberal and not a radical.
There are clear parallels that call for comparison between FDR and Obama, yet I do not think the difference is so much one of personal courage or competence or conviction, as of difference of circumstances.
As bad as the 2008 crisis was and remains, it was dwarfed by the Great Depression. Like Obama, the crash had occurred under the previous president, but in Roosevelt’s case, the country had suffered through more than two years of Republican President Hoover and a Republican congress that adamantly stuck to Republican ideology (same as today) but were completely ineffective in dealing with the crisis. The Republicans were thoroughly discredited with a large number of Americans.
Roosevelt was a patrician white Anglo-Saxon Protestant who, when he said he welcomed the hatred of the business class, was referring to his own class. That takes a special kind of courage, but it is very different from the situstion Obama faces as America’s first black president.
The modern Republican Party has molded itself as a weapon specifically to destroy what FDR’s New Deal had created, and to some extent had already done so and are certainly still trying to do so. They are not merely stupid, like the Republicans of Hoover’s day, but have far more technique and cunning based on their decades of experience since FDR.
Finally, as all-powerful as the business and financial sector of Roosevelt’s day was, the financial sector of today is incomparably more so. I get a sense of vertigo even thinking about how much more powerful and sophisticated they are.
In FDR’s case Wall Street had been brought to its knees by the Great Depression. Obama’s task has been to PREVENT the financial crisis from turning into another Great Depression. He did so and let us hope he can continue to do so. But in order to do it he has had to tread a lot more carefully.
ABsolutely, in fact, I originally included a paragraph on that point, but cut it because I thought the comment had grown long enough.
The area that concerns me the most is Wall Street itself. Since a certain element of Wall Street (Larry Summers, Geithner) has a common interest with the Democrats in fighting the Tea Party.
However, I think there are some important factors that can check this. See my reply to Marie2 below.
Big business is going to fund the side that they think will win, and will do their bidding. If it comes down to a Democrat and a Tea Party extremist in a moderate district, then I expect Big Business to support the Dem.
But if its a republican gerrymandered district, I would expect Big Business to support an establishment GOP candidate even if it meant putting up big money in a primary or going 3rd party.
The GOP governors are just doing their part of messaging to try to lay the shutdown at Obama’s feet. That’s all that’s going on.
Plus it distracts from their own scandals (like Nikki Haley’s Revenue Department allowing massive identity theft).
Well, for instance you’ve got Bobby Jindal spouting total idiocy like this:
So they’re trying to distance themselves from Washington while continuing to promote the exact same garbage as their fellow Republicans in Washington. And, for instance, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person in California who has a vivid understanding of how supermajority requirements fuck up your government.
The Republicans are going to have to choose between the fucking Tea Party and the United States of America. It’s as simple as that.
On the other hand, Gov. Walker in WI is trying to “pretend” he will refuse a federal demand to shut state parks.
Gov. Brewer in AZ uses the republican national shutdown as an excuse to end welfare payments.
GOP governors in good shape. Out of the twenty-four they currently hold, only highly vulnerable in three: ME, PA, and VA. PA and VA had Democratic governors recently.
The FL and MI GOP governors are dreadful, but they’re still rated as toss-ups. OH and WI appear set to keep the odious Kasich and Walker.
That’s based on PVI analysis and not on anything remotely responsive to what next year looks like if the shutdown continues. States are very much dependent on federal funding in many ways. If there are large economic consequences it throws any analysis into disarray attention focuses on the winning narrative that actually stops the pain. We know which narrative that isn’t.
Problem is that the GOP has a narrative and the opposition doesn’t. In the short-term that leads to some electoral victories for Democrats. However, in the long-run that we have seen over the past four decades that has led to the GOP getting huge amounts of its agenda passed and virtually no gains on the left and many gains have been rolled back — abortion being on of them.