Reply #6: They are master manipulators. The infighting just leaves the most venomous standing at the end [View All]

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/143648

In It For the Long Haul

Progressives can be forgiven for licking their lips at the delicious state of disarray displayed by the Grand Old Party in this particular brouhaha, for thinking that it signals doom for the GOP.

Fine, if you're thinking short-term. But this is the way radical conservatives won the larger game in the past -- by forcing the party elders to the right, even when to do so meant near-certain defeat.

In 1964, the right forced the disastrous presidential nomination of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. While that defeat was resounding, it set the stage for Richard Nixon's triumph four years later by stoking the fear of communism in the American people.

Although Nixon wasn't the conservative that Goldwater was, his administration harbored some of the right's keenest minds, notably speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan (now an MSNBC political analyst), and bureaucrat Howard Phillips, who went on co-found the religious right.

Phillips and Buchanan teamed up again in 1996 to hone the inside-outside strategy that finds echoes in tomorrow's special election in New York. Buchanan ran for the Republican presidential nomination that year, pitting himself against Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, the former majority leader.

Buchanan beat Dole in New Hampshire, but failed to win the nomination. Still, along the way, he collected enough delegates to buy himself some bargaining power.

In the meantime, Phillips had put together a far-right third party, the U.S. Taxpayers Party, that was courting Buchanan as its candidate. By threatening to march his delegates out of the GOP and into Phillips' arms, Buchanan successfully commandeered the Republican Party platform away from Dole's people and into the hands of his own. The result was disaster for Dole, but it served to push the GOP even further to the right, paving the way for the nomination of George W. Bush.

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For Armey and the FreedomWorks crew, the Fox pundits and the Club for Growth, the fight for the 23rd district is more about reminding the GOP establishment who's in charge: The business interests who fund those organizations, whose CEOs were likely not amused by the specter of a moderate Republican congresswoman who embraces the Employee Free Choice Act, a proposal for legislation that would make it easier for workers to join labor unions.

All their organizing on Hoffman's behalf bought him a shiny war chest, into which he reached for a barrage of television ads -- one featuring Thompson of TV's Law and Order fame -- arrayed against Scozzafava.

Jackson Stephens, a board member of the Club for Growth, created a group meant to look like a pro-Scozzafava organization that launched an ad calling the Republican candidate "the choice for progressives," highlighting her support for same-sex marriage, abortion rights and EFCA.

Republican leaders got the message. When their candidate dropped out of the race on Saturday, they lined up behind Hoffman, the right's man. When Scozzafava, battered by the right, endorsed Owens, the Democrat, she was condemned by her former backer, Newt Gingrich, who told the Associated Press that he was "deeply upset" by Scozzafava's support of Owens. "I'm very, very let down," Gingrich said, "because she told everybody she was a Republican, and she said she was a loyal Republican."

Yet Gingrich, once the upstart who pushed his party's leaders further to the right, also decried the tactics of Armey and Palin, telling Fox's Greta Van Susteren, "... this idea that we're suddenly going to establish litmus tests, and all across the country we're going to purge the party of anybody who doesn't agree with us 100 percent -- that guarantees Obama's re-election. That guarantees Pelosi is speaker for life. I mean, I think that is a very destructive model for the Republican Party."

Newt's probably right. In the short run, this could be good for the Democrats.

But American politics is cyclical in nature. No victory is permanent. Sooner or later, voters tire of one side and elect the other.

As the Republican Party condenses to its most bitter strain, the poison is distilled. Chances are, that poison will be dispersed into the populace when voters at last tire of the Democrats. And that would be very bad for all of us.