Because he's not a jabbering idiot, Murphy understands that Republican "red hots" can't be elected everywhere. The GOP is going to blow its second chance in row to take the Senate because the Tea Party insisted on nominating ideological mouth-breathers in places where it would be difficult to elect them under ideal circumstances. It's important to remember that Richard Mourdock was tied or only barely ahead in Indiana before he started publicly musing about God's relationship with rape babies, and Indiana is a naturally Republican state.
The Tea Party went out of their way to nominate Mourdock by assassinating Dick Lugar, who was about as conservative as you can sanely expect a statewide figure to be. A seat that went Republican with 87.3% of the vote in 2006 is very probably going to be a Democratic pick-up tomorrow. Happy?
And yes, this is exactly what happened in Delaware two years ago, when the Tea Party killed a guaranteed winner in Mike Castle to nominate a born loser like Christine O'Donnell. And these congenital morons actually seem to like it that way! They prefer their House budgets being declared dead on arrival by Harry Reid (who himself only survived in office because the Teapers insisted on nominating a psychopath) instead of having at least a fair hearing by a rational Republican Senate.
Therefore, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Tea Partiers hate Mike Murphy. They hate anyone who thinks in anything more complicated than bumper sticker slogans. I actually don't feel at all bad insulting the intelligence of the Tea Party, if only because their very existence insults the intelligence of everybody else.
Look at poor Scott Brown, who turned out to a much better senator and politician than I expected. The Tea Party didn't waste any time in claiming credit for electing him, but they ferociously turned on him the second that he started acting like he might want to be reelected in a liberal state like Massachusetts. Chances are that he's going to lose tomorrow.
For people who clearly enjoy dressing like it's 1776, the Tea Party displays an almost shocking ignorance of recent political history. They regularly cite historical "wave elections" that have broken their way, such as 1946 and 1994, and forget completely exactly why they won or everything that happened afterward. It shouldn't surprise anyone that they subsequently repeat their own mistakes.
There have been three huge GOP wave elections in the last seventy years; '46, '94 and 2010. In all three cases, they were the result of new Democratic presidents (Harry Truman, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) having been seen as overreaching with a liberal agenda. Rather than seeing those elections as a repudiation of liberal activism, they stupidly saw them as an popular embrace of their own ideology, and they went on to dramatically overreach. Truman and Clinton went on to be reelected and Obama almost certainly will be.
As I said on Thursday, this election is pretty much over. The swing states that I gave Romney were largely out of combination of pity and a conservative sense of caution. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Obama wound up winning Virginia and New Hampshire, thereby breaking 300 in the Electoral College.
So now I'm going to (yet again) write up the autopsy that I've already written repeatedly over the last six years. Some of you will be bored to tears by it, but I have newer readers that shouldn't be expected to go through nearly a decade of my thinking.
There are actually two Republican parties; one that understands how life works, and one that doesn't. The one that doesn't wins short-term gains (as it did in '46, '94 and '10,) but damages the party in the long-term and single-handedly reelects otherwise weak Democratic incumbents. Say what you will about Thomas Dewey and Bob Dole, but Truman and Clinton ran more against their respective Republican Congresses than they did the GOP's presidential nominees and I'm amazed that Obama didn't also.
For people who stand so strongly on the principle of personal responsibility, the alleged "right wing" (which is actually more populist than conservative) of the GOP always finds a way to blame everybody but themselves for their failures, despite an abundance of historical evidence to the contrary. Usually, it's a "biased media, " their own nominee, or a combination of the two.
But Robert Taft wouldn't have done better than Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Ronald Reagan would probably have done worse against Jimmy Carter in 1976 than Gerald Ford did. And does anybody think that Pat Buchanan would have succeeded where my heroes George H.W Bush and Dole failed in the 1990s?
Most Tea Partiers will be loath to tell you this on Wednesday morning, but there was a time when they and their ilk touted Mitt Romney as the "conservative alternative" to John McCain. It was only when half-wits and unelectable mutants like Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain threw their protective helmets in the ring that they dumped all over Romney. Do you see any of them putting together a better map than Romney has? Really?
Because of their singular inability to recognize reality, there's going to a blood-letting on Wednesday morning. Because they really don't see anything as being their fault, the Tea Party will overlook that it was them that stopped the GOP from taking over the Senate or gaining seats in the House. They'll blame everything on Romney, who remains the most electable candidate that ran, instead. The more sophisticated among them will blame Gary Johnson, ignoring entirely that he will not have thrown a single state to Obama and that their own shabby treatment of him forced him to run as a Libertarian in the first place.
But you won't hear a single one of them say that tomorrow's loss was their fault. Not one. I can guarantee you that.
As Mike Murphy said in the above tweet, this is going to be about who understands math and who doesn't.
The fantasy wing of the GOP has gone out of their way to pretend that two things aren't happening: The change in American demographics and the consequent shrinking of their own map.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 broke the Roosevelt coalition of the "Solid South," labor, and northern blacks forever, allowing the GOP to grow their map. Between 1968 and 1988, the former Confederacy joined the more libertarian southwest and Mountain states in Kevin Phillips' predicted "sunshine belt," while the industrial midwest remained a battleground. It didn't hurt that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W Bush (in '88) all managed to win California.
The Golden State GOP then decided to run against Latinos and Proposition 187 effectively finished the Republican Party there as a statewide force. The hardline backlash against the 2007 McCain-Kennedy immigration bill opened up the southwest to Democrats for the first time in a long time, allowing Barack Obama to win New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado and do better than he had any right to in Arizona. For their full-throated defence of SB 1070, the Tea Party isn't going out of their way to tell you that it's author, Russell Pearce, was the first legislator in the history of Arizona to be successfully recalled.
But, please, keep demagoguing Hispanics. We'll see how well that works out in ten years when Texas becomes a swing state and the GOP is mathematically incapable of winning a national election.
John Edwards spent the better of decade screamimg that Democrats can't win without carrying at least two of the former Confederate states when he wasn't breeding bastards with loopy campaign videographers. Tomorrow, Obama is going to prove him wrong. Even if he sheds Virginia and North Carolina (which will both still be close,) the Democrats have more paths to 270 than the Republicans do, and they have them without a single southern state.
Increasingly, you're going to see the Republican marriage to religious hucksters like Ralph Reed further damage the party in the more libertarian western half of the country, especially as the economy recovers (to the extent that it ever does, which I think is not much for next decade.) The GOP's superstition-based opposition to increasingly popular initiatives on drug legalization and gay marriage are ultimately going to hurt them in states like Colorado, which are increasingly urban and liberal on social issues.
You can't be a national party when you build a firewall around yourself with old, religious Southern whites, who are dying off faster than they can be counted. Even the Deep South is (gradually) becoming more Latino and socially libertarian than it was even ten years ago, albeit more slowly than the rest of the country. But, rhetoric aside, the Republican Party can't stop themselves from attacking libertarians, especially supporters of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, who tend to be younger and better educated than the "al-Qaeda (the base)" wing of the party.
Tea Party voters are getting played to a degree that shocks even me. For nearly three years now, they've been subjected by regular "bait and switch" tactics from their lobbyist overlords that they have yet to fail to fall for.
Remember in 2009, when the Teapers were "all about the economy and didn't care about social issues?" Not so much now. They're even further to the right on them than Pat Robertson. Remember how they were going to save $700 billion from Medicare, despite it being "socialism?" Then we saw the Ryan budget that cut exactly the same amount and threw seniors into the loving embrace of the insurance industry.
Not only are these people a demographically dying breed, they can't be taken seriously as an intellectually honest force now. The easiest way to "save" Social Security and Medicare (if such a thing is possible) is to immediately raise the retirement age, cut benefits and lift the payroll tax on incomes more than a hundred thousand dollars. For reasons that I've explained before, the Ryan plan is a pipe dream that suggests that he's been living on a steady diet of MDMA since high school.
More importantly, the Tea Party is lying to you about the real "47% welfare problem." They want to talk about states like California and Illinois, but neglect to tell you that they send more to Washington than they take back. The states that don't (with the exception of New Mexico) are the deepest of red states. Given their entitlement culture, I think that Alaska should've been the sixteenth Soviet Socialist Republic. And the Deep South and Texas tend to be wiped out by hurricanes far more frequently than does, say, Manhattan and even New York City pays far more to the federal government than it takes back.
At best, these people aren't telling you the truth about "the entitlement culture." At worst, they don't think their disaster relief, farm subsidies and innumerable other forms of federal welfare are just that.
Political science majors, elected officials, scumbag consultant types and asshole media figures want you to believe that politics is more complicated than it really is. All you really have to do is understand demographic trends and apply them to a map. which is much easier than you would think it is.
Those demographics and that ma don't bode well for the Republican party in the long run. Old, white religious people are being rapidly outnumbered. And they are every bit as inclined to believe that they're entitled to the entitlements as old-school liberals are. So on top of being outnumbered, they're intellectually dishonest or willfully blind.
Unlike Mike Murphy, I don't think that the side that "gets math" is going to win. I lack the faith that pragmatic thinkers are going to beat cheap populist demagoguery before it's too late.
Ironically, the Democratic, segregationist South makes my case for me. The South had at least thirty years notice that Jim Crow was coming to an end. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman called for federal anti-lynching laws. Truman was able to desegregate the military by executive order without significant political push-back. When Republicans joined northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey in passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, no matter how watered down it was, the Southern Old Bulls failed to see that the writing was on the wall.
By 1964, it was too late for them to see that the time for them to make the best sustainable deal they could had passed and within thirty years, they were extinct as a species. The same thing is happening to the GOP nationally.
Look, you can have 100% of the House being all Tea Party, all the time. It isn't going to make a lick of difference without a sympathetic Senate, and that just isn't going to happen. If those people can't win statewide, which we now know that they can't, we know that they'll never form a majority, especially if they can't keep the Scott Browns of the world in office. And if they can't do that, they'll never elect a president who would sign their nonsense into law.
Americans like to think that they're better than Europeans, which is a specious assertion. Europe fought any number of 70 and 100 Years Wars, while Americans crumble in despair if they fight as long as ten, as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan. What makes anyone think that they'll be any sturdier in a political war?
The supposed "hard-right" of the GOP (which tends to control America's semi-functionally retarded primary system) calls the shots. And they'll almost certainly nominate a misfit like Santorum - or someone forced to be exactly like him - next time. And he'll be stomped to death by a born loser like Joe Biden.
Hopefully, it won't be too late. I not-so-secretly hoped that that they would've nominated Sarah Palin this year, who would have been absolutely destroyed in the Electoral College, and given the Tea Party no cover for their loss. Mitt Romney's ideological prostitution will be completely ignored and he'll be blamed for losing because he's "moderate Mitt."
Make no mistake about it, it'll take a full-on Bircher Republican getting killed in an election before the Republicans become a serious force again. Don't look at 2016 for this to happen. Look at 2020, or even 2024, assuming that the United States isn't a third-world country by then.
Moronic cable news and blogoshere propaganda aside, Barack Obama is not all that liberal. His policies have pretty much all been lifted from the GOP of the late 80s and early 90s, which people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh supported at the time and can't stop lying about now. In all honesty, I'm actually far more comfortable with Obama as president than a Mitt Romney who has never demonstrated that he has the balls to stand up to the weapons-grade stupidity of the Tea Party.
But that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it. I'd prefer a common-sense Libertarian, like Gary Johnson in office precisely because he would stand up to the excesses of the left and what passes fr the right these days.
I'm naturally inclined to support the Republicans, which I did until 2003. But the party has doubled-down on everything that forced me to abandon Bush and his corrupt, lobbyist-loving, kid-fucking and jail-bound Congress. I do not believe it is the job of the federal government to raise Terri Schiavo from the dead, give hard-on pills to grandpa, or bomb brown people into democracy and I'll forever fight anyone who thinks it is. I don't believe that a party that started two endless, losing wars that could have been easily won should be allowed to start a third.
I want a president that can actually address America's problems in a realistic way. In an ideal world, that would be a Republican like Colin Powell, but that isn't going to happen in his lifetime or probably mine. So here's my preference in order;
- Gary Johnson
- Barack Obama
- Some streetcorner pimp
- A teenage girl that huffs gasoline and cuts herself
- Mitt Romney
But I invite you al to argue with the math.
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