#gop #barackobama #mittromney #uspoli #cdnpoli #obamacare
Having a chance to digest the American Presidential elections, I am glad that American voters opted to stay the course and not venture into Romneyland politics and that of a dysfunctional Tea Party infiltrated Republican party.
Who won the election? The easy answer is that Barack Obama won. The Democrats scored a victory too; as they defended their majority in the Senate and in fact increased their hold. The house, well they won the popular vote, even gained some congressional seats, but stay in the minority thanks to seat boundary ‘fixing’ by Republican controlled state legislatures.
Who lost? Most certainly the Tea Party.
The Tea Party had a humble grass roots start. It was a conservative uprising that was triggered largely by the advent of Obamacare. It was their belief that the program was a constitutional over-reach by the Obama administration through its legislative mandate and its ‘taxes’ it needed to install as a means to fund it. On both counts, the program was deemed both constitutional and hardly a tax. However noble the protest movement started out as, it quickly grew into something far worse.
The Tea Party became an outpost of radical thinking for all those who not only disapproved of the administration, but actually hated him. In this closed circle of like minded thinkers, their toxic rage began to boil. Republicans, who wanted back into power knew that they had to tap into this undercurrent of anger and motivated activists as a new pool of voters.
That began the shift of the GOP further to the right of the worst excesses of the George W. Bush administration and began to take some of the talking points of the tea party thinking as policies of their own. Now funded by powerful corporate entities, the Tea Party is no longer a grass roots body that was protesting a policy. Its become the hate division of the Republican Party.
So this populist and angry voting block has grown large enough to be a deciding factor in GOP politics. This means that in order to win a primary battle in GOP circles, you have to out-conservative your opponent. Crazy? Fact! To win the hearts and minds of a group of people who are already spitting mad, you have to be as dedicated to answering their angry demands not pandering to anything moderate…these people wanted radical action on their grievances or they’d look elsewhere. This is how Richard Lugar, a reliably conservative Republican Senator for Indiana was ousted by a socially far-right tea party activist in the primary battle. His crime against the GOP? That he had worked with the Democrats on occasion for bipartisan legislation. End result? In the GOP friendly state of Indiana, voters opted for a Democratic Senator instead.
This happened in Missouri as well. One of the weakest senate seats for the Democrats was held by Claire McCaskill and every Republican saw this as one needed to regain a majority in the Senate. Then Todd Akin, a Tea Party evangelical scored an upset win in the primary season and became the GOP pick. That would have been fine had he not attempted to differentiate ‘legitimate’ rape from rape itself. Appalled, the federal GOP pushed hard to have Todd Akin quit the race. It didn’t happen, and the result was a romp win by 11 points for the supposedly weakest Democratic Senate seat in the nation.
The Tea Party has taken the Republican Party to an electoral cliff. They have pushed an absolutist agenda that leaves no room for compromise and only invites more radical thinkers as its natural evolution carries on. The GOP can follow this movement off the cliff or they can push back.
As an unabashed progressive, I was happy to see Obama elected in 08, and content to see him re-elected in ’12. He isn’t without a blemish on his record; keeping Guantanamo Bay open being the biggest offense to my political thinking. His signing of the NDAA and refusal to relax some of the most Orwellian excesses in the Patriot Act really irk me. Would John McCain have done the same? Absolutely. Mitt Romney? Even more so. That makes Barack Obama the lesser of the evils on the ballot, but that’s hardly a good measure of a quality candidate.
This marks an absolute failure of the Tea Party and some Republicans in their alternative universe version of reality campaign. How did they not win when they had many people convinced that Barack Obama wasn’t born in America, was a Socialist, and a radical Islamic hardliner that is sympathetic to terrorist causes.
The Tea Party is the new Neo-Conservative, except with a domestic political aim. They tried to create a venomous hatred towards the nations’ own President and it failed. America is better for that.
