National Party News

I have to respond to fellow contributor Brent Budowsky’s post yesterday, “Medicare Extremism, GOP Waterloo,” in which he describes Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) proposal to overhaul Medicare as “the worst policy idea and the worst political blunder of the millennium.”

It’s true Republican Jane Corwin’s defeat in New York last night suggests the GOP might be losing the fight over Medicare reform; but the fact is Corwin tried to have her cake and eat it too. She opposed ObamaCare while criticizing the Ryan plan, and she offered no clear alternatives of her own.

Now Rick Santorum attacks John McCain on the issue of torture. It is amazing — a major party has a pro-torture wing. Santorum has the audacity to attack a war hero who knows more about torture than he will ever know. Now Santorum backs off, but we know what he really thinks.

This is revealing. The president who made excuses for torture allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. The president who opposed torture ordered bin Laden's death.

Besides the pro-torture wing, the GOP has a global warming denier wing and a birther wing. The denier wing denies science, the birther wing denies the citizenship of the president.

Looks to me like the Republican Party is declaring class war against the American people. They want Americans to pay more for their gasoline, and more for their Medicare, while they want oil companies to keep unfair profits and insurance companies to profit from rip-off premiums.

Next thing Chuck Schumer will quote Newt Gingrich saying Paul Ryan is radical, while Paul Ryan will quote Rush Limbaugh saying Newt Gingrich supports the healthcare mandate, while Ron Paul will quote Alan Greenspan saying Ayn Rand is great, while Mitt Romney will quote Mitt Romney saying universal healthcare is good, after Mitt Romney quotes Mitt Romney saying universal healthcare is bad.

Certain Republicans, even youngish ones, mistake conservatism for orthodoxy. They seem out of touch, as if they were selected by a Republican College of Cardinals, like George W. Bush actually was. So former China Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr.’s call for “new thinking” at the University of South Carolina, where he gave the commencement speech, should be heeded. We need “new thinking.” We need new generations. And new ideas always need new packages.

"Our system needs new thinking,” he said. "We need a fresh generation of innovators, leaders, risk takers, entrepreneurs, scientists and activists — that's you!"

In contrast, the orthodoxy finds representation by Dick Cheney, who, like the Officer in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” nostalgic for the torture machine of the old days, said he would reinstate waterboarding if he were president. Cheney is poison to any Republican hopeful.

Last week Karl Rove, the official voice of what Sarah Palin calls the “GOP Establishment,” took the bait. He called Donald Trump a “joke candidate.” Then at the end of the week Charles Krauthammer ran a lineup of what he considered to be the GOP potentials for 2012. Krauthammer, who might be considered the GOP Establishment’s apparatchik-in-chief, said of Trump, “He’s not a candidate, he’s a spectacle,” calling The Donald “merely vulgar.” A “provocateur and clown,” like the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Krauthammer proposed Mitt Romney as the GOP Establishment’s first (and only, really) choice. That’s terrible news for Romney, because in a Trump vs. Romney race with Romney as the official representative of the Rove/Krauthammer/Bush/Cheney GOP Establishment, Trump wins.

The recent polling that shows President Obama administering a serious whipping to a generic Republican opponent is a serious warning to Republicans about a Republican brand that is looking too darned weird to many mainstream American voters.

My advice to Republicans: Get off the extremist wing and get with the program with mainstream America.

Why do Republicans oppose new programs that create jobs while giving a prominent place to weirdos like the birthers?

Why do so many extreme Republicans deny science, deny reason and deny climate change while they wage political holy wars against National Public Radio, which is supported by many mainstream Republicans along with Democrats?

My good friend Ed Gillespie is a smart guy and an exceptional communications professional. I heard him speak a couple of weeks ago about politics and he made a good point about how Republicans tend to communicate on immigration policy. He said that Republicans often forget to finish the sentence when it comes to talking about how we like legal immigrants, but dislike illegal immigration. People usually just hear the part about how we hate illegal immigrants.

I agree with Ed on immigration policy, and I think his point carries over to the latest debate that has engulfed Congress.

Before Wisconsin, the Tea Party was only an abstraction. Now it is a real movement. Time starts here. The states suddenly realize they are free.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) marks the day. He stands fast while Organizing for America, President Obama’s residual campaign organization, runs 15 phone banks against him and fills buses of protesters to flood the state.

But where will the Tea Party go from here? At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference they offered a trip to Alaska. They head in the right direction. Walker has even now been mentioned as a presidential contender in 2012. But The New York Times reported that during the crisis he called Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Jeb Bush in Florida to consult. Christie and Jeb Bush have been mentioned by Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard as his first choice for president and vice president in 2012. Is this where Tea Party should be going? No. It should press on to Alaska.

What’s with the House Republicans and their inability to listen to the American people or live up to their promises?

Yesterday, I posted here about the Tea Party Caucus throwing its promise not to abuse House rules to advance its anti-everything agenda into the harbor. Just a few weeks after campaigning against what they called abusive and unfair tactics, members of the caucus are now trying to employ the very same tactics in an effort to circumvent House rules.

Now the Republicans are falling down on their promise to “listen to the American people.” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) once said, "The people's priorities will be our priorities. The people's agenda will be our agenda. This is our pledge to America; this is our pledge to you!"

Rand Paul was interviewed last night on "The News Hour," a sign that the Tea Party has arrived on America’s comfy sofa.

Now the Pauls have a problem. They don’t have a plan. There are plans out there, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s book, Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America From Washington, provides an excellent manual. The difficulty comes in thinking regionally in a country that has been thinking globally since Alexander Hamilton. But when Richard Nixon was president he had an idea that may be suited to our times: regionalization.