So, then, it appears that the electorate remains surly. And it also appears that the unpleasantness is being manifested by means of internecine conflict within the Republican party, at least to this point. The old guard politicos are, to use the technical jargon, freaking out. The most striking example of this was the defeat of Mike Castle last night in the Delaware primary.
The conservative talking heads on television say that Christine O’Donnell cannot win the general election in Delaware, and so poof, there go the chances of a Republican Senate. Okay, and this warning would make some sense if the goal were a Republican majority in the Senate. But why is that a goal at all? When the Republicans had control of both the House and the Senate, what did they do with it? Right — they ran up the biggest deficits hitherto known to man.
It would not be fair to compare them to the subsequent Obama, the Michael Jordan of deficit spending, for two reasons. One is because Obama hadn’t happened yet. To use health care language, Obama wasn’t a preexisting condition. The Republicans at the time were being the worst ever. The fact that it could in fact get worse after that doesn’t make the earlier forms of “worst yet” okay.
The second reason is that Obama happened because of Republican irresponsibility. The Republicans paved the way for the Anointed One. The Republican Party establishment made Obama possible. So we need to get it into our minds that we should do everything we can to make sure the elections in November do not present us with a choice between Stage 2 cancer and Stage 3 cancer. That doesn’t seem to me to be too much to ask, but to hear some people on the teevee talk, I and others like me are being most unreasonable.
We are being told that “we need to get” Republican numbers. But you guys had Republican numbers before, and what did you do with them? It is pretty clear to me that it has not yet dawned on the Republican establishment types that the tea partiers are just as angry with them as they are with the Democrats. The Republicans are the grossly irresponsible spenders and the Democrats are the manic, frenzied spenders. At least the Democrats are out of their minds.
The Republicans are like an abusive former boyfriend, one who used to slap his girl around quite a bit. She finally left him, and hooked up with another man, one who enticed her with words like “hope” and “change,” but turned out to be the kind who would beat her savagely. So when she starts making plans to leave the second guy and go live in a shelter, the first boyfriend, never the sharpest tool in the shed, takes this as an indication that she is falling in love with him again. He thinks he sees the lovelight in her eyes again, while it is only the glint of resolve to be done with the process of trying to choose a guy based on who might be less of a loser. “I know what I will do,” she is now thinking to herself. “I am done with this kind of guy period.”
As for myself, I am happy just to watch this thing go down the road. One commenter has astutely noted that there have been far more miscalculations about the tea partiers than by the tea partiers. The received-wisdom-pundits have big heads, but they are in over them.