BDBoop
Platinum Member
- Banned
- #1
The Morning Plum: How the GOP can save itself from the Tea Party
This is a life lesson they have yet to learn. If your happiness is predicated on somebody else's behavior, you just declared yourself powerless with regard to your happiness. Because you can't control other people, no matter how hard you try. And they've been trying (unsuccessfully) to sink Obama since Day One.
If the GOP is going to be saved (HUGE "IF"), then they will need to start working with Democrats, against the TPM members. And I don't think it will take much for the sane members of the GOP to find a middle ground project they can get behind.
Infrastructure could be a very good starting point. Get some bills, get some jobs, rebuild some will with the people who sent them to Washington to govern.
In other words, stop trying to kill government and start making it effective again.
And so, with polls showing the GOP brand has cratered, the focus should come back to a reality-based assessment of whether Republicans think they need to show they can govern again. The answer to that may be No, they dont, because their House majority is invulnerable. If so, we wont get immigration reform, and there will be no budget deal, and well get another chaotic battle over another clean CR, and possibly (but far less likely) one over the next debt limit hike. Well continue lurching from crisis to crisis, and well find out in November 2014 what it all means politically.
But if the answer is Yes, youd think that at some point, this has to stop being all about Obama all the time, and more about how Republicans are going to find their way back to entering into basic policy give and take with Democrats. This will require accepting as a given that Tea Party conservatives will probably never accept anything that results from compromises reached within conventional governing norms, and shaping the partys approach around that reality.
This is a life lesson they have yet to learn. If your happiness is predicated on somebody else's behavior, you just declared yourself powerless with regard to your happiness. Because you can't control other people, no matter how hard you try. And they've been trying (unsuccessfully) to sink Obama since Day One.
If the GOP is going to be saved (HUGE "IF"), then they will need to start working with Democrats, against the TPM members. And I don't think it will take much for the sane members of the GOP to find a middle ground project they can get behind.
Infrastructure could be a very good starting point. Get some bills, get some jobs, rebuild some will with the people who sent them to Washington to govern.
In other words, stop trying to kill government and start making it effective again.