Midterm Elections: Win or Lose, Republicans Are Still a Wreck

[Purveyor]

Oct 30, 2014 9:28 AM EDT
By Francis Wilkinson

On the verge of victory in the midterm elections, the Republican Party looks no less shaky than it did on the verge of defeat in 2012. The base appears no less irate than at any other moment in the Obama era, and the party leadership's plans look no more coherent or calibrated to the times.

House Speaker John Boehner's policy speech last month at the American Enterprise Institute garnered little attention, perhaps because it was such a wee bitty thing, small and sad. (When your economic plan has five pillars and one is "tort reform," you are really asking more of the 1980s than a creaky bygone decade can deliver.) Even some conservative economists can't muster enthusiasm for the jumble of haphazard suggestions that constitute the party's "jobs" agenda.

Perhaps that's why my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru isn't ready to break out the champagne. I'm betting on a Republican victory, but I'm also betting that will be the high point of Republican control of Congress. They still haven't figured out whether a majority in both houses of Congress would require them to behave more responsibly, proving they can be competent, or more fanatically, showing they can better channel the base's rage. It's not clear that they will reach a conclusion soon.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told donors that if Republicans don't use the next Congress to "prove we could govern, there won’t be a Republican president in 2016.” Politico described McCarthy's agenda with this shorthand: "Legislative cliffs are over."

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell begs to differ. He told Politico that his game plan entails passing high-stakes partisan legislation and daring President Barack Obama to veto it at the risk of, yes, shutting down the government:

“We’re going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy,” McConnell said in an interview aboard his campaign bus traveling through Western Kentucky coal country. “That’s something he won’t like, but that will be done. I guarantee it.”

more...

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-30/win-or-lose-republicans-are-still-a-wreck

[unblock]

1. when democrats are a wreck, we lose elections, big time.

republicans are a horrid, incompetent, flailing, dangerously negligent mess, and are odds-on to parlay all this into full control of congress.

[RussBLib]

2. I think I have passed into the acceptance phase

I voted, and I've worked some phones, so my conscience is clear, but I was just thinking that, even if the GOP takes over Congress, so what? They are still the bigoted, woman-hating, immigrant-hating party they have been, and they will overstep as usual and probably get routed in 2016.

The world will still turn; I will still be married to a wonderful woman; we will still retire; the plants will still grow; I will still be pushing for atheist rights; music will still sound awesome; and the Republicans will still be total dicks.

Demographics are changing and they will be kicked out again soon enough. Fuck those bigots.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. Yeah, well, Republicans own the secret black box vote "counting" machines. So, we have to defeat

them as well as their candidates to win. IMHO

[RBInMaine]

4. Still, this is NOTHING like 2010. Races are so close. GOTV GOTV GOTV and we'll hold our own.