Phases of a crisis

The suicide machine known as the Republican Party should be facing a massive recall right about now, the better to find a way to stop the episodes of unintended acceleration that make the GOP vulnerable to going over a cliff between now and November.

There doesn’t seem to be an emergency brake or kill switch anywhere in the machinery. In their inexorable drive toward unswerving ideological purity, conservatives are imposing what amount to loyalty oaths on their followers, and woe unto those apostates who wander too far off the grounds.

David Frum can testify to that. Frum, author, former Bush 41 speechwriter and a true believer in conservative principles, was “terminated” yesterday from his staff position at the American Enterprise Institute, after Frum made on-air comments on MSNBC, and wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com finding fault with the failed Republican strategy for derailing the health-care legislation that is now the law of the land. In the CNN column, Frum said the health care issue had proven to been a sad turnabout of last year’s conservative confidence:

“The ‘Waterloo’ threatened by [South Carolina Senator] Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.”



Frum may also have been cashiered for putting talk-radio Rottweiler and former recreational pharmaceutical enthusiast Rush Limbaugh in his place. Also from the CNN piece:

“When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say -- but what is equally true -- is that he also wants Republicans to fail.

“If Republicans succeed -- if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office -- Rush's listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.”

Then, in another rare burst of conservative candor, Frum said on ABC’s “Nightline” that the right-wing ideological bent of Fox news, and the Republican Party’s dance with that network was damaging to the credibility of the party.

"We're discovering we work for Fox," he told ABC.

Frum has insisted the excommunication was his idea, after AEI leadership offered him the chance to stay and work for free. It’s hard out there for everyone, even conservative columnists. No doubt disenchanted with making pro bono work a part of his résumé, Frum announced his departure. “Premises will be vacated no later than April 9,” he wrote in a letter to AEI president Arthur Brooks.

Ja Car commented at The Huffington Post: "Somebody forgot to tell Frum AEI is a 'we tell you what to think tank.'"

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It’s more evidence (like you need any more) that the Republican Party is experiencing the kind of existential crisis that occurs in large corporations and other unwieldy human enterprises, and for at least some of the same reasons. There’s insight from the corporate world that’s easily analogized to the travails of the GOP.

The American Press Institute held a conference of CEOs from various media concerns in November 2008. The conference had, among things, the mission of discussing survival options and timetables for the newspaper industry in a time of unprecedented challenge, and crisis, for print journalism.

In a summary, one that made use of the graph you see here, the Institute entertained the advice of a business turnaround specialist and professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who determined that companies under such stress “should start [course correction] by plotting their place on a ‘Phases of a Crisis’ chart. The earliest stage is indicated by a company essentially blind to eroding conditions undermining its business. This is followed by acknowledgement but inaction, followed by faulty action in hopes of a quick fix, followed by full-blown crisis and finally dissolution of the enterprise.”

According to the specialist, “[F]ailure to take action at any point on the curve means the enterprise inexorably moves to the next point. As an organization moves down the crisis curve, it will find executing a recovery plan more difficult, and will have less time to do it.”

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Where the Republican Party is on this hypothetically relentless downhill trajectory is open to debate. Trying to get a sense of “rock bottom” is hard to do when the rocks that are presumably at the bottom keep moving under your feet. Some observers will say the GOP is at the top of this poison wave — somewhere in the vicinity of the P1 value: “Blinded,” unable to look past ideology in order to see the ruinous course it’s on. Others will say the grim slide is well underway, and that the GOP is leaving the P3 zone (“faulty action”) and headed straight for P4 — full-on “crisis.”

Recent behavior by Republicans suggests that they’re on the outskirts of crisis this minute. The leadership would do well to look into this. Despite the fact that the graph was prepared to address problems in a completely different organizational structure, the Phases of Crisis graph looks to be as applicable for a rudderless political party as it is for a newspaper business, another concern that hasn't kept pace with a changing world.

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Image credits: David Frum: NBC News. Limbaugh, October 2009: NBC News. Phases of a Crisis graph: American Press Institute/Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Drinking the Kool-Aid Tea

In what may be the most egregious kowtow of a major political party to a political nonentity in at least recent American history, Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, met on Tuesday with members of Tea Party WDC, maybe the most formally established manifestation of the series of ad hoc conservative protesters and extremist malcontents that have rallied under the Tea Party banner for nearly a year.

Steele reportedly huddled with about 50 Tea Party leaders for more than four hours, discussing their angles of attack on the Obama White House, what Republicans and Tea Partiers have in common, and what they don’t have in common, in the runup to the 2010 midterms.

“The chairman believes it is extremely important to listen to this significant grassroots movement and work to find common ground in order to elect officials that will protect these principles,” RNC spokesperson Katie Wright said Tuesday to The Washington Post, offering an olive branch the size of a tree to the cohort of American conservatives that could, maybe, be a force in November.

We may be months away from a political scenario once thought improbable but more and more likely all the time, a variation on the storyline of “King of Hearts,” the 1966 Philipe de Broca film that posits what happens when the inmates run the asylum, and the town it’s located in.

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The devil and the details are inseparable. Even as the Tea Party makes its mainstream move (a unifying flag-bedecked logo, spokesmen with titles), it’s forced to come to grips with issues that have complicated its existence from the jump.

Credibility has been a problem for the Tea Party set. To this point, the TP’s followers have been characterized by a noisy intolerance that traffics in the symbols of don’t-tread-on-me populism married to silly exercises of self-identification (Tea Party members walked around last April wearing tea bags) and virulent intolerance (others carried signs that equated President Obama with Hitler).

To now, it’s been an orange-pekoe protest whose buffoonery contained just enough extremist rhetoric to make it something to take at least semi-seriously. But it’s hardly enough to suggest it could be a political game-changer for the broad cross-section of Americans who vote.

Another problem for the Tea Party (really, stemming from the first one) has to do with the fraud of its genesis. When the first large-scale Tea Party protests began last April 15, in demonstrations from Oak Harbor, Wash., to Sag Harbor, N.Y., they were heralded as the bellwether of a new grassroots, bottom-up movement in America.

The facts were something else again: A parade of K Street lobbyists and government insiders like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were instrumental in sparking and bankrolling the protests; and Fox News, the conservatives’ media arm, broadcast the Tea Bag Day rallies from various places around the country.

It’s impossible to believe that the fingerprints of such conservative powers could have disappeared from the movement in less than a year. The populist thrust of this movement was blunted from the start, and still is, by the involvement of the same government and corporate insiders the movement was meant to protest against in the first place.

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What’s the Tea Party’s reason for being? From the start, most people couldn’t see much difference between the bullet-point credo of the Tea Partiers and that of the Republicans. Even today, Americans still can’t find daylight between their mutual positions. The GOP and the Tea Partiers are in lock step on major issues like tax cuts, smaller government and the disturbingly imprecise notion of “returning to American values."

With no substantive differences in their basic philosophy, then, the TP movement is faced with a question: What can it hope to do in Washington that the GOP can’t do with more resources, more lobbyists, more like-minded partisans already on Capitol Hill? Carving out a distinction when there’s not much distinction is a huge challenge if you define yourself as an independent grassroots political insurgency — like the Tea Partiers do.

That’s what the Tea Partiers have tried to do: articulate distinctions between themselves and the Republicans; they’re doing what they can to make their claim of independence stick. “We're not a function of the Republican party,” one D.C. Tea Party member said last April, and said for a damn good reason. Implicit in that statement is an inescapable fact: If the Tea Party finds common cause with the Republicans, the Tea Party has absolutely no reason to exist.