The GOP and its malcontents

Sometime on Tuesday night, some idiot cut the propane line on the gas grill at the Virginia home of the brother of Rep. Thomas Perriello, a Democratic congressman who voted for the health care bill that was just signed into law. An organizer for the Lynchburg, Va., Tea Party, posted on his blog what he believed to be the congressman’s address, in case “any of his friends and neighbors want to drop by and express their thanks regarding his vote for health care.”

It goes without saying that a lit match anywhere near that line could have meant a disaster for Bo Perriello, his wife or their four, small, children. Happily, that didn’t happen. But that little incident reflects how the Republican Party in particular and the nation in general are dealing with something even more combustible.

With the passage of the health-care reform bill into law, the Republicans have started the ritual blame game, deciding who in the conservative ranks was at fault for the most stunning legislative rebuke the GOP has sustained in years.

They can start with their philosophical brethren, the good folks in the Tea Party movement.

◊ ◊ ◊

The behavior of Tea Party activists in the weeks and days and even hours before Sunday’s pivotal House vote — when TP protesters stained the parliamentary process with hateful posters and old-fashioned racist invective — probably made it easy for Democratic fence-sitters to throw their weight behind the Obama legislation that passed.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

But the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party crowd isn’t isolated to the Tea Party. After the vote came down on Sunday, GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa spoke to a crowd of TP activists.

“You are the awesome American people,” King said. “If I could start a country with a bunch of people, they’d be the folks who were standing with us the last few days. Let’s hope we don’t have to do that! Let’s beat that other side to a pulp! Let’s chase them down. There’s going to be a reckoning!”

◊ ◊ ◊

On Saturday, Missouri congressman Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and icon of the civil rights movement, was called a “nigger.” And Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank was labeled a “faggot” by protestors who shouted at him as he made his way to work.



South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip and like Lewis a veteran of the civil rights era, told The Huffington Post that he “heard people saying things [over the weekend] that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus.”

And then there was that little outburst on Sunday by Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas, the conservative who shouted “baby killer” at Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan on the floor of the House of Representatives, while Stupak was defending his support of the bill.

◊ ◊ ◊

Want some more? On the day Obama signed health-care bill into law, Carl Paladino, a Buffalo millionaire and Republican candidate for governor, equated the impact of the new federal health care law to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The day that bill was passed will be remembered just as 9/11 was remembered in history,” Paladino told Curtis Sliwa during a morning drive-time interview on AM-970. “It was an attempt by these people in Washington to defy the Constitution.”

In the days since the signing, there have been at least 10 attacks or threats against Stupak and other Democratic lawmakers in upstate New York, Kansas, Ohio and Arizona.

And, oh yeah, that severed gas line at Bo Perriello’s home.

You can’t say President Obama’s inauguration 14 months ago didn’t put people to work. It effectively created a full employment act for Tea Party activist sign painters, graphic artists and Web designers all over the country. In their angry Photoshop-capable hands, the 44th president of the United States has been transformed into a witch doctor, a lab-coated mad scientist, Batman’s nemesis the Joker, a surrogate for Osama bin Laden, a Russian general and a darker, leaner version of Adolf Hitler.

The Internet is of course a great conduit for artistic outrage. Recently, for example, the SarahPAC Web site, run by former Alaska governor and political personality Sarah Palin, displayed a map of the United States featuring 20 crosshair designs scattered over various states — 20 crosshairs meant to symbolize the 20 House Democrats thought to be politically vulnerable in November.

And if that ballistic metaphor isn’t enough, check her Twitter page. That’s where, in the wake of conservative defeat last weekend, Palin wrote: “Commonsense Conservatives & Lovers of America: Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”

◊ ◊ ◊

But there’s another element to all this. Clyburn’s sense of the pervasiveness of this attitude — “This stuff is not all that isolated,” he told MSNBC. “It's pretty widespread. I hope it's not too deep" — anticipates the reality documented in a March 2 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC report, the cover story of its quarterly Intelligence Report publication, documents “an astonishing 244 percent increase in the number of antigovernment Patriot groups in 2009.”

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.

◊ ◊ ◊

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.

◊ ◊ ◊

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.

Palm Palin: A hand job and its consequences

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may be either the most daringly self-inventive political figure on the American scene or just the one most desperately in need of a clue. From making the mavericky decision to quit her state post (vacating a power position of some leverage if she really wanted to be president) to writing a roguey book that nonetheless made her a millionaire in as close to overnight as this economy allows, Palin is carving out a reputation as a Rashomon presence in our political culture: adored or reviled, depending on your perspective.

Two recent events bear that out all over again. On Feb. 6 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Palin addressed the first Tea Party Convention, a gathering of conservative iconoclasts, ideologues and malcontents for whom the Republican Party is, for now, apparently not conservative enough. Palin, a darling of the Tea Party set, vaulted into another variation of her set speech:

“Very good to be here in Tennessee, the Volunteer State. It’s the home of good country music and good southern barbeque, and…great to be at the Tea Party Convention. I guess down here, that’s some southern sweet tea. And you know, up in Alaska, we have a smaller version of Tea Party up there, and we call it ice tea.

“And I am a big supporter of this movement. I believe in this movement. Got lots of friends and family in the lower forty-eight who attend these events, and across this country, just knowing that this is the movement and that America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this. ...

“This is about the people ... and it's a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a TelePrompter,” Palin said at one point, making a reference to Obama's use of TelePrompters.

But something shows up on the replays of her Nashville speech. At one point, when her left hand is momentarily open, it’s visible: there are talking points clearly written on her left hand in ink:

Energy
Budget cuts [“budget” crossed out, replaced by]
Tax cuts
Lift America’s spirits

Independent journalist Stefan Sirucek, writing in The Huffington Post, offers a clarification:

“The notes most likely weren't for her speech, for which she used prepared remarks, but for the Q&A session that followed, during which she glanced at the hand in question.

“But in my opinion that's even worse.

“There were no specifics on there, just general concepts and things she supports.

“The takeaway is that this presidential contender apparently can't remember her supposed core principles and needs a cheat-sheet when simply asked about her beliefs.

To quote Charlie Brown: Good grief.”

◊ ◊ ◊

Jotting crib notes on one’s hand is nothing new for public speakers. It’s usually done to spur a speaker’s recall of salient points to be elaborated on at length and in depth. What’s so problematic for Palin is how this plays into the long-building narrative that she doesn’t think on her feet that well.

And what was written — a clutch of bullet-point words and phrases — only superficially dovetailed with anything approaching a policy statement or an original political philosophy. The handwritten notes and the address they stemmed from had only the scarcest detail and insight. They point to how Palin thinks in bromides and slogans, skimming the surface of the nation’s most important issues.

The Tea Party crowd assembled in Nashville wouldn’t have cared that night; they greeted her with rapturous applause, and the kind of automatic hosannas professing an appeal that continues not in spite of the mainstream’s denigration of Palin, but because of it.

◊ ◊ ◊

A new poll released near the same time as Palin’s hand job indicates that the country as a whole is a lot less charitable. A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted between Feb. 4 and Feb. 8 found that 52 percent of Republicans say she’s not fit to be president.

Among the general American population, 71 percent of people say she is unqualified for the gig — an 11 percent increase in unfavorables just since November.

A Feb 1-3 Gallup Poll puts it another way. Naming their preferences for the 2012 derby, 14 percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning voters — independents in all but name — support former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the presidency. Fourteen percent is hardly a ringing endorsement, but at this early stage and no firm field of contenders, it’s pretty much expected.

But it’s striking that, after her furious media exposure since the 2008 camapign (a best-selling book, a job as a Fox News analyst, numerous magazine covers and mentions) only 11 percent of those voters in the Gallup survey back a Palin campaign in ’12.

That response could be based as much on disbelief in her political acumen; in some ways it could be their way of saying that right now, Palin’s overexposed, a light burning twice as bright for half as long.

◊ ◊ ◊

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Palin’s problem, now and in the ’08 GOP debacle, has been having the ability to build a consensus of like-minded partisans, few of whom have a like mind to begin with. Her initial post-2008 support from regular Republicans smitten with the promise of a new and attractive face has fragmented into backing from the Tea Partiers, whose birther-fueled hate is hardly a platform for a springboard to a national campaign, let alone a shot at a national victory.

And Palin herself speaks in such passive-aggressive, flag-bedecked generalities, she’s created a following built around the flimsiest outlines of a political philosophy. She’s the Great & Powerful Oz from the Yukon.

And since for the most part her talking points dovetail with those of the Republicans — tax cuts, rein in government spending, fidelity to GOP social tripwire issues — the question for the rock-ribbed GOP crowd and independents alike is simple: Why fool around with a Republican Lite when they can have the real thing?

The fact that at this point Romney leads any hypothetical pack of Republican contenders is important. If he’d had a sharper message and been a more inspiring messenger, Romney might well have been the Republican nominee for president in 2008. As it is now, from the standpoint of personal achievement, government service and political credibility, Romney’s electables dwarf Palin’s by orders of magnitude. There’s not enough room on both of her hands to write the reasons why.

---

Image credits: Palin: Reuters/Josh Anderson. Palin left hand: Unknown. 2012 poll snapshot: Gallup Poll.