Just as the GOP candidate has for more than 100 years, Dede Scozzafava was supposed to win the congressional seat in New York's 23rd district. Then Palin stepped in.http://www.alternet.org/politics/143648/sarah_palin_and_the_tea_party_movement_are_at_war_with_the_gop?page=entireSoon Hoffman was Glenn Beck's favorite interview subject. (The local chapter of Beck's 9-12 Project is a big Hoffman booster.) Tea Party sites around the nation started talking up the Hoffman candidacy and condemning Scozzafava. The Club for Growth had found its candidate. Michelle Malkin, the Fox News commentator whom AlterNet last met at an astroturf event, threw in.
And don't forget the pundits of another media property owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.: those of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
If this cast of characters sounds familiar, it should. These are the same forces who organized the disinformation and thuggery campaign against health care reform, and are many of the same personalities who created the right-wing Tea Party march on Washington on Sept. 12 -- the one with all those "Don't Tread on Me" flags and the signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin.
It's the American right, in its broadened, big-tent form, and its leaders have learned from past mistakes -- and successes.
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.
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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.
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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.
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