I think it is probably pretty rare that John Fund and Ed Kilgore agree about anything. But, today, they’ve both written columns that insist that, contrary to a lot of bigfoot reporting you’re seeing, the Texas Tea Party had a relatively good night yesterday in the primary elections.
Mr. Fund focuses mainly on the election results, and offers little in the way of commentary. But he does close his piece with this:
Establishment Republicans such as Bill Hammond, the president of the Texas Association of Business, explained the results as follows: “People who don’t think we should be investing in things like water and roads used that as a hammer against legislators who have the long view and are worried about the people of Texas.”
National reporters may have looked at the top-line Texas results and concluded it was a rebuke of the Tea Party. But locals know better as indicated by the following somewhat mournful headline in this morning’s establishment-oriented Houston Chronicle: “Tea Party Movement Apparently Wasn’t Over After All.”
Based on that, I think we can infer that John Fund is not thrilled with the result of the primaries in Texas.
Mr. Kilgore is more straightforwardly focused on what the results mean. For him, the “who won” and “who lost” aspect of the primaries glosses over the fact that the Establishment candidates were running so scared that they sounded like Tea Partiers themselves.
The situation in Texas reflects a more general dynamic in the GOP, dating back at least to the concessions Mitt Romney made to “constitutional conservative” orthodoxy (from signing onto the radical “Cut, Cap, Balance” budget pledge, to taking a hard line on immigration, to promising a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act) in order to secure the Republican presidential nomination over weak and divided “true conservative” opposition. The more the tea party movement (itself mainly a continuation of the “movement conservative” faction that has been struggling for preeminence since its breakthrough in the Goldwater campaign of 1964) influences mainstream GOP policy positions and rhetoric, the less it may succeed in intraparty contests with an “establishment” that has largely coopted it, and whose differences are mainly over strategy and tactics rather than core ideology.
In Texas the high-profile GOP candidates who allegedly smote “the right” are hard to distinguish from the insurgents these days. And down-ballot, the real fire-eaters who think the ideological counter-revolution has just begun did quite well.
If you put these two takes together, I think you get something that’s interesting. As the Establishment works, with middling success, to fend off the Tea Partiers, their candidates actually begin to become hard to distinguish from their challengers. Yet, we’re still left with one faction that wants to invest in infrastructure and one faction that does not. A fundamental difference still exists, but it becomes submerged and difficult to see.
Mr. Kilgore notes that even insofar as the Establishment had a decent night, they accomplished it by moving (or being pulled) to the right. How that works in detail depends on the issue you’re concerned with. When a candidate has merely given lip service to a radical position, that’s one thing. When they’ve felt compelled to make radical pledges and promises, that’s another.
The Republican Establishment in Texas may remain distinguishable from the howling horde in some substantive ways, but the way they present themselves to the nation is now just plain frightening.
The GOP’s biggest delegation looks and sounds just like Louie Gohmert. The smarter ones look and sound just like Ted Cruz.
That’s going to be a problem for the national party going forward.
