The Tea Party's Strategic Ineptitude

When the Tea Party surfaced in 2009, I backed the movement’s general philosophy and political objectives. However, following the historic Republican victory in the 2010 elections, which was undeniably driven by Tea Party energy and shrewd grassroots organizing, I became a critic of the movement’s lack of strategic savvy engendered by a false sense of invincibility and hubris.

Since then, the Tea Party’s popularity has declined precipitously, and its vaunted grassroots energy and mobilization efforts could deliver neither the Senate nor the White House for the GOP in 2012. (Yes, I know all about how Mitt Romney wasn’t a true conservative, and therefore couldn’t energize the base to turn out for him as it would have for a true believer. The scapegoating of Romney for GOP misfortunes is belied by the hundreds of millions of dollars conservative groups poured into electing Romney, by the extreme desire of conservatives to defeat Obama, by talk radio’s “we must vote for Romney” consensus, and by the fact that Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock, who unseated the “Establishment-RINO” Richard Lugar in the GOP primary, lost in solidly Republican Indiana.)

The Tea Party’s low approval ratings can certainly be attributed in part to the national media’s concerted efforts to vilify these patriotic Americans. And while the media’s role in the Tea Party’s receding fortunes should not be understated, neither should the shocking strategic ineptitude of the Tea Party and its major supporters in non-profits, in Congress, and in talk radio.

To better understand this ineptitude and without revisiting the original rationale behind the decision to tie defunding of Obamacare to funding the government, let’s look at the aftermath of the budget deal reached in October to end the government shutdown, and the long-term budget deal struck in December.     

        

When the Senate and House overwhelmingly voted to approve a deal to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government, the self-anointed leaders of the conservative movement immediately denounced Republicans for acquiescing to a budget agreement that did nothing to undermine Obamacare.

The harsh criticism was all too predictable and sweepingly counterproductive to the wellbeing of not just the Republican Party (who are after all part of the problem, according to our conservative overlords) but the conservative movement as a whole.   

If the leaders of the Tea Party and the conservative grassroots, well-meaning conservatives like Jennie Beth-Martin or the Madison Project’s Drew Ryun , were strategically savvy, they would have praised Speaker Boehner for holding the line for as long as he could and for doing everything in his power to do something which everyone knew was impossible: defunding Obamacare through the CR process.

Instead, Jennie Beth Martin, Mark Levin, and the other stalwart guardians of the conservative ideology unleashed a barrage of attacks against Speaker Boehner, Republican Senators, and anyone else they arbitrarily deem to be a member of the Inside-the-Beltway Establishment or the “Ruling Class.”

They said it was the Establishment, those dreaded RINOs, who betrayed the infallible Senator Ted Cruz and the conservative cause by agreeing to the Senate deal. And they reflexively attacked the House Republican leadership for “surrendering.”

They were oblivious—oblivious to the point of delusion—that neither the House Leadership nor the conservative Republican Senators who voted with Senate Leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell had any other viable alternative. Had they continued to “hold the line,” we would have hit the debt ceiling, and forced to eliminate in one fell swoop 40% of the government—a prospect that all, not most, all non-fringe conservative economists and business leaders agree would have been devastating and entirely pointless.

In other words, Senate and House Republican leaders had two options as of October, 2013: support a short-term spending measure at the 2013 Sequester levels and reopen the government, or risk a completely unnecessary financial disaster, for which they would have been blamed.  

They chose wisely.  

Speaker Boehner fought the good fight. He stood with Ted Cruz and the Tea Party movement for as long as he could. He submitted bill after bill defunding or delaying Obamacare. He slammed the White House and Senate Democrats for their intransigence, their unwillingness to compromise or even negotiate. He fought literally to the last 90 minutes of hitting the debt ceiling.

He was a good conservative soldier and he should have been praised as such. The same goes for Mitch McConnell. Yet, he was subjected to wrathful denouncements by Tea Party leaders. Men and women who had no plan for what would happen once the Senate and the White House invariably rejected defunding or delaying Obamacare. Men and women who insisted that John Boehner fight an unwinnable fight, only to stab him in the back once he lost.

Two months later in December, 2013, facing far less scrutiny from the media, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan struck a long term budget deal with Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray.

Although generally well received by moderates from both sides, the deal was criticized by both conservatives and liberals for conceding too much to the other side. But by far the most vociferous opposition came from our friend Mark Levin and the conservative grassroots, who were against the budget deal before they even read it, prompting Speaker Boehner to fire back against the same people whose torch he carried during the government shutdown.

Given how unfairly they had treated him, Speaker Boehner’s reaction wasn’t a surprise (though I think a more prudent Speaker may have avoided publicizing the internecine warfare, which gave an opening to the left and their media allies to attack conservatives.)

The deal brokered wasn’t perfect, but incredibly, it didn’t give Democrats the three core things they wanted. Given that the GOP controls just one third of one third of government, it was indisputably the best deal conservatives could have gotten.

But alas, the deal struck by the staunch conservative Paul Ryan and passed overwhelmingly by the Republican caucus was an anathema to the Tea Party because it didn’t go far enough in cutting spending. Fortunately this time, with a few notable exceptions, the conservative leadership in Congress  ignored the base, and the best result conservatives could have hoped for was achieved. Undeterred,  the Tea Party was furious and vowed to crusade against Boehner, Ryan, et al.

And this is the environment conservatives currently find themselves in. President Obama’s popularity and credibility have taken massive hits largely because of the Obamacare fiasco, yet the severe internal division within the conservative movement threatens conservative electoral prospects.  

Predicting what the political environment will be like next November is futile—there are too many unknowns. What is known is that the Tea Party’s ironclad commitment to making the perfect the enemy of the good does not bode well for putting the GOP in the best possible position to win the Senate and strengthen its House majority. The conservative movement is divided. Whether conservatives like Paul Ryan have the leadership skills and strategic savvy to unite the movement remains to be seen. But if conservatives are to win back the White House and build a lasting majority, unite we must.

The war between the Establishment and movement conservatism reached its zenith when Ronald Reagan and his allies took on the Nelson Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party in the 1970s. Reagan challenged and almost beat a sitting GOP President Gerald Ford in the 1976 primary, and beat out the more establishmentarian (though not a big fan of Nelson Rockefeller) candidate George H.W. Bush four years later. 

Today, self-anointed conservative leaders in the Tea Party (a movement whose core philosophical principles I embrace) are obsessed with refighting this battle. They see Rockefeller types everywhere they look, even when their targets are staunch anti-Rockefeller (to use an anachronistic phrase) conservatives like Tom Coburn and Paul Ryan. They see anyone in the GOP leadership as a member of the vaguely defined Establishment, even though Speaker Boehner towed the Tea Party line throughout the entire shutdown, never once turning on the Tea Party caucus.

The Tea Party’s willingness to fight their own in the open can be boiled down to this principle:

If you agree with us on policy and strategy, but disagree with us on tactics, you are part of the problem, a sellout RINO, and a member of the surrender caucus.

Just think about the breathtaking hubris of such a position. If I agree with Ted Cruz on policy (Obamacare is bad for the country), agree with him on strategy (Obamacare should be repealed), but disagree with him on tactics (Obamacare should not be defunded through the CR process), I am a RINO!

The Tea Party sees the current Republican civil war as a battle between the Establishment and movement conservatives akin to Reagan taking on Rockefeller. But it’s not that. Paul Ryan is not a Nelson Rockefeller Republican. Neither is John Boehner. The war the Tea Party is waging is not against the Establishment; it is against conservatives who recognize the limits of power (and especially power limited by minority representation in Congress.)

It would greatly behoove the Tea Party to lay down arms in its war against conservatives who don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good and who pursue conservative policies that can actually be achieved. It is acceptable, and indeed desirable, for the conservative base to pressure Republicans to maximize conservative outcomes. The Democrats' left-wing base does the same thing. However, there is a big difference between pressuring the GOP to move right and demanding the GOP do something that is politically impossible and then excoriating them in the harshest possible terms. Notice that the left-wing base doesn't do that.    

We won’t know what long-term impact the current conservative infighting will have on Republican electoral prospects. What we do know is that Tea Party leaders who have come unhinged in excoriating Speaker Boehner and others do nothing to advance those prospects, or the conservative cause.            

The Great Race Hoax

My take on why the far left has racialized President Obama and the implications of racialization. Click here to read the full article posted on the American Thinker:

When Barack Obama rose to national prominence following his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, his African-American heritage was a footnote to the fawning reception he received from the media and from most Americans.

While the speech was not a case study in brilliant oratory, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama exuded charisma and eloquently discussed an appealing if not particularly original theme of unity and bipartisanship.

Fast forward to today. President Obama's race is no longer a footnote. It is central to his presidency. It is arguably his defining characteristic. Unity and bipartisanship are nowhere to be found.

Who is responsible for this? The blame rests squarely with the American Left, and specifically, with the racialists.

Though it's hard to pinpoint the precise point when President Obama ceased being a post-racial president, I suspect the transition from post-racial to racial accelerated in late spring of 2009, when his approval ratings started to drop from his all-time highs.

It was around that time that the far left began to baselessly speculate that maybe it was the president's race that was causing people to lose confidence in him.

By the time the tea party became a national movement in the summer of 2009, accusations of racism were rampant. Left-wing activists and the media pointed to a handful of offensive (not even necessary racist, just tasteless or crass) signs out of thousands to dishonestly paint the entire movement as racist.

The "birther" fringe gave the Left additional fodder to levy the racism charge.

Soon, the racism charge was leveled not just against the decidedly non-racial and non-racist tea party (many of whose leaders are black), but against all of Obama's political enemies.

Of the scores of pundits in media who routinely vilify and slander their political opponents as racists, many are either employed by or regularly appear on MSNBC, a non-news network which even the left-wing The New Yorker mocked for its complete lack of balance, refusal to air conservative voices, and unequivocal commitment to Obama and his agenda.

If MSNBC is the premier hub for left-wing hatemongering, then Chris Matthews is the hub's supreme commander.

Ever since it became mainstream in far left circles to denounce Obama's conservative detractors as racist, Matthews has been fanatically committed to ensuring that no one outracializes him.

His race baiting often reaches levels previously thought unreachable, such as when he argued that Mitt Romney's reference to "Chicago" was racist. Why? Because Chicago is an urban city with many black inhabitants.

But who is the real racist? When someone mentions "food stamps," Matthews thinks of black people. After one Obama speech, Matthews declared that he "forgot [Obama is] black." Another way of saying that is that Matthews remembers that Obama is black all the time.

Let's face it, if the first thing that Chris Matthews thinks of when he hears "food stamp" is black people, then that's a far better reason to accuse him of being a racist than any reason he has invoked to slander conservatives.

It wasn't a surprise then when Chris Matthews used the occasion of Nelson Mandela's death to compare Obama to Mandela and GOP to apartheid-era racists.

So much for MSNBC and their far left-wing guests. If the charge of racism was confined to the rubber rooms at MSNBC and the small number of Americans who watch that unwatchable network, then it would have no further implications.

But alas, the race conspiracy has gone mainstream. The examples abound.

When David Gregory - of the supposedly mainstream NBC news network -- interviewed Rep. John Lewis during a Meet the Press special commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, John Lewis perverted the "take back our country" slogan by deliberately misinterpreting it to mean that conservatives want to go back to the segregation era!

David Gregory made no response. By saying nothing, he legitimized it. Of course, conservatives sometimes use the "take back our country" slogan to convey that Obama's policies are antithetical to the American tradition of limited government, akin to Michael Moore's book Dude, Where's My Country? which was meant to convey Moore's particular disagreements with the Bush Administration. Funny, no one accused Michael Moore of being an anti-white bigot.

(Not to be outdone, Chris Matthews also unleashed an attack on decency and sanity as a way to commemorate the famous speech.)

The charge of racism is unequivocally absurd and ought not to be brought up in polite company. Obama's high personal favorability ratings, which have exceeded his job approval ratings throughout his presidency, and which have only now started to fall due to the ObamaCare fiasco, belie the myth of race-based opposition. After all, if you disapprove of Obama's policies because he is black, then why would you like him and trust him?

So why has the Left racialized Barack Obama and his presidency? Is it intellectual laziness? An unquenchable desire to smear the hated conservatives? To some extent, it's both. But there's another, more sinister and consequential motive behind the Left's vile attacks on Barack Obama's political enemies.

A central tenant of the racialists' political philosophy is the belief that the United States is an inherently racist country, where racism and so-called "white privilege" trump liberty, individualism, and all other American values.
The proponents of this theory use every case of injustice against a black person -- whether the case is real, fabricated, or anomalous -- to showcase America's deeply racist roots. They are, like Chris Matthews, obsessed with race, and unable to ascribe a nonracial motive to (white) human action.

The election and reelection of President Obama should have been a devastating blow to the racialists: how could a racist country where white privilege reigned supreme elect and then reelect a black president? The short answer is that a racist country could not -- the racialists' theory is bogus.

But leftists do not lay down their arms just because the truth shatters their worldview. As the opposition to Obama grew, the racialists saw their opening: Obama may have been elected and reelected, but the white ruling class, an amorphous cabal of racists, is working tirelessly to ensure Obama's failure by daring to oppose his clearly brilliant policies. It made no difference that conservatives have always staunchly opposed liberal presidents and liberal policies. No, race was the paramount reason for conservative opposition.

The injection of race into the political debate serves two fundamental purposes that go beyond merely smearing political opponents. First, it perpetuates the myths of white privilege and rampant institutional racism. And second, it lays the foundation for rewriting history to conform to the racialists' agenda.

How do the racialists want history to judge President Obama's term in office? Do they want to see it primarily as an epic collision between progressivism and conservatism or do they want to see it as a collision between an African-American president and the racist ruling elite?

Make no mistake about it: the far left intends to write the history of Obama's presidency with the racial theme as the centerpiece. Whether it will work is unknown. One must also differentiate between short-term and long-term history. Historical revisionism that treats the president's race as the dominant aspect of his term might pervade pop-history in the short term, but it might be soundly rejected by historians and popular culture 50-100 years from now.

Nevertheless, historical revisionism is the intent of the racialists. If Obamacare collapses in two years, they will point to the president's race. If he leaves office an unpopular president who failed to achieve anything of substance, they will blame race.

By legitimizing the race debate, the mainstream media has in effect enabled this forthcoming perversion of history. It will happen. The only question is whether the racial theme will be absorbed into the historical record or whether history will expose it for what it is: the great race hoax.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/the_great_race_hoax.html#ixzz2omvPrKWc

The Religious Left's Moral Fallacy

My latest piece in the American Thinker takes on the new fad of invoking Jesus to advance left-wing policies:

President Obama is pivoting once again to decrying the alleged sin of income inequality -- the left's perennial and favorite class-warfare theme.  At the same time, the religious left is becoming more vocal in American politics, couching its opposition to income inequality in theological rhetoric.

When Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin took shots at Pope Francis for his apparent critique of capitalism, leftist religious scholar Reza Aslan pounced.   

Writing in The Washington Post's "On Faith" section, Mr. Aslan contends that Jesus preached "revolutionary social teachings" whereby "the rich will be made poor, the strong will become weak, and the powerful will be displaced by the powerless."

He writes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin:

[I]f these "culture warriors" who so often claim to speak for Jesus actually understood what Jesus stood for, they would not be so eager to claim his ideas for their own. In fact, they'd probably call him a Marxist.

To his credit, Mr. Aslan acknowledges that most modern Christians don't interpret these ostensibly radical pronouncements literally, but treat them as "abstract ethical principles."  But then he summarily rejects this interpretation, presumably because it doesn't conform to his own radical leftist views.

The underlying theological doctrine advanced by Mr. Aslan, the popular leftist pastor and writer Jim Wallis, and the nascent left-wing political advocacy group "Nuns on the Bus" is that Jesus would have undoubtedly supported left-wing economic policies, such as wealth redistribution and high taxes.

In his book God's Politics, Jim Wallis -- the godfather of the contemporary religious left -- goes so far as to argue that true Christians should vote Democrat because Republicans favor cutting taxes for the rich (actually, Republicans support cutting taxes for everyone who pays taxes, but that's an inconvenient truth the left chooses to suppress).  According to Wallis, tax cuts help the rich and hurt the poor.  Ergo, the Republican platform of tax-cutting (and by extension smaller government) is antithetical to the Christian ethic of caring for the poor.

This theory is grounded in two false assumptions.

The first is that tax cuts and smaller government automatically help the rich and hurt the poor, while higher taxes and a larger welfare state do the opposite.  This is the quintessential leftist attack on capitalism in general, and it has been empirically debunked in every corner of the globe that has abandoned socialism and radical wealth redistribution in favor of free markets and economic liberty.  The infusion of capitalist policies, including lower taxes, has lifted people out of poverty and improved the standard of living for the average person exponentially.

Conversely, every nation that has embraced socialist policies has experienced declining standards of living and increased poverty, not to mention unsustainable levels of debt.  

A massive welfare state advocated by Aslan, Wallis, et al. is not a recipe for alleviating poverty and improving the economic wellbeing of the masses.  As history teaches us, it is a recipe for economic stagnation, or worse, economic calamity.   

The second demonstrably false assumption is that Jesus's lesson that we must help those in need was actually a direct call for left-wing economic policies -- if not outright Marxism, as Aslan gleefully implies.

Speaking  at the National Prayer Breakfast last year, President Obama echoed this tripe when he invoked Jesus to support redistributionist policies.

Notwithstanding Aslan's literal understanding of Jesus's premonition that the fortunes of the rich and the poor shall be reversed, at no point in the Bible does Jesus advocate for a coercive government that confiscates wealth from some citizens to give to others.

Jesus was a moral philosopher, not a political philosopher.  He preached what the moral individual ought to do and how individuals ought to treat one another.  That is decidedly different from advocating a political system in which the government determines what portion of their incomes individuals must forfeit to the state.    

The religious left's false assumptions about the free-market economy and Christian duty stem from their conflating voluntary moral action with the government coercing individuals to act "morally."  This is a perversion of the very essence of morality.  

An action is moral only if the individual, endowed with the gift of free will, chooses to act morally.  If you strip the individual of choice, forcing him to give up his income to a cause the state decides is moral, it cannot be said that the individual has acted morally.

Moral action via coercion is a paradox.  Only voluntary action can be deemed moral or immoral. 

By the same token, leftists conflate society with government.  Whenever President Obama and the Democrats celebrate the virtue of people coming together to help those in need, they purport to espouse Christian, and indeed, basic human values.  But invariably, they're talking about government force, not voluntary cooperation among individuals.  The former is statism; the latter is the cornerstone of a free society.

Beyond confusing voluntary charitable action with state coercion, there's perhaps an even more fundamental point: the more power the state has over the individual, the less likely the state is to act in the best interest of the greatest number of people.  To quote Lord Acton, "all power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

That is why every socialist regime that has ever existed has been tyrannical.  In other words, even if you believe that forcing an individual to be "charitable" at the point of a gun is consistent with Christian theology or general principles of morality (it isn't), the inevitable outcome of state coercion will be not a more charitable and prosperous society, but a more economically depressed and despotic one.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/the_religious_lefts_moral_fallacy.html#ixzz2mvzrKN5