Yesterday was Frankenstein Day. Author Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, 216 years ago today, but her legacy lives on in the American political landscape.
""You are my creator but I am your master;-Obey!"
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
With this declaration from the monster, the power shift that Shelley's the entire novel has been building up to between the monster and his creator is complete. This is noteworthy because Frankenstein created his creature with the intent to overpower it and control it and yet, from the moment the creature was brought to life, the opposite has occurred. Dr. Frankenstein allows his life to be run and his actions be determined by the actions of his creation. With the monster’s declaration of power, Dr. Frankenstein can no longer even pretend that he is truly in charge, as all involved in the power struggle know that it is the unnamed creature that is truly calling the shots.
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Despite the best efforts of its incumbent Senators, think-tanks and well-heeled donors, the Republican Party just cannot kill the heedless, mindless monster it created.
WASHINGTON — For the past two years, Republican senators facing re-election have very deliberately spent millions of dollars, hired multiple consultants and cast scores of conservative votes with one goal in mind: avoiding the embarrassing primary conflagrations that befell their party in 2010 and 2012 and cost Republicans a chance at taking back the Senate.
It has not worked.
...Despite their careful efforts, some of the best-known and most influential Republicans in the Senate have been unable to shake threats from the right and have attracted rivals who portray these lawmakers as a central part of the problem in Washington.
The
Times article describes the challenges to Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander by a GOP base fed up with clubby Senators they consider indifferent to their radically conservative syllabus. And while the primary candidates fielded by the Tea Party may not defeat any of these GOP stalwarts they continue to drive them to the far right and thus away from the electorate they need to cultivate in a general election. And they also continue to cost the GOP money:
Republican incumbents often move to the right to fend off a primary fight from that wing, which only emphasizes party infighting over core issues like immigration and how best to tackle fiscal disagreements on Capitol Hill, often damaging them in a general election.
The costs are monetary as well as political. Mr. McConnell is now forced to fight on two fronts simultaneously and early against Matt Bevin, his Republican challenger, and Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, and has already spent $700,000 on advertising.
As such, the races are emerging as the real test of the latest Republican strategy to deal with insurgent candidates and of the power of the Tea Party in 2014. The result could dictate not only the future influence of the Tea Party in Congress, but also the ability of Republicans to hold on to or gain seats.
The inability of the Party establishment to come to terms with its base is also evident in the House, where members on vacation are
deliberately steering clear of their constituents, a far cry from the halcyon days of 2010.
Gone are the packed, freewheeling town halls of the past, where voters stood up at microphones and pelted elected officials with questions on just about anything. Members of Congress largely put an end to unscripted, up-close-and-personal events after the traumatic summer of 2009, when dozens of lawmakers were shouted down by mad-as-hell Tea Partiers and citizens angry that the proposed Affordable Care Act was going too far or not far enough. It was a “toxic mess,” says Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Former Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Delaware Republican who’d held hundreds of town halls during his 20 years in Congress, recalls that at one event, captured on YouTube (GOOG), people started yelling at him about Obamacare “death panels” and the president’s “fake” birth certificate. Castle, who lost his primary that year, says a dozen colleagues who saw the video told him afterward, “No more live town halls. I’m done with that.
The Bloomberg article notes that both Democrats and Republicans are avoiding the Town Halls, but it wasn't Democratic voters who drove them away. It was the Tea Partiers who shouted them down with bile they'd been fed by talk radio, turning the democratic process into a mockery of thuggish behavior and intimidation. So instead of more representative Democracy, these erstwhile "Sons of Liberty" have actually succeeded in getting less. Congrats, guys.
The Tea Party is also doing its level best to alienate the Hispanic and Latino vote in 2014:
A small but loud group booed and heckled Florida Sen. Marco Rubio while he tried to give a speech at a conservative conference here Friday, a sign that his support for a bipartisan immigration bill has hurt him within some elements of the Republican Party.
“No Amnesty!” several people shouted when Rubio walked to the lectern at the Defending the American Dream Summit, an annual gathering of Republicans and conservatives organized by the advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.
When these astroturf groups created the "Tea Party" they should have leveled with their creation at some point and acknowledged: well, thanks for your passion, but this was all a scam for enriching corporate executives through deregulation and lower taxes, and had nothing to do with "liberty," "freedom" or any other such high minded ideals. But they never came clean to their monster, and now the monster is on auto-pilot. The monster attends these meetings, waves its flag and goes back home to its non-AFP sponsored websites where it bitches about amnesty for brown people and evil Obamacare menace. The problem is, he sees the same people he voted for paying nothing but lip service to his ideals. Meanwhile, the black guy is still around. In fact he's been given another four years to torment the monster. And after that it's looking more and more like Hillary.
So the monster goes from shock and disbelief, to anger.
"I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream"
He wants to take out his rage on his Representative in the House. But his Representative is nowhere to be seen.
“Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?"
As Kim Messick puts it today in
Salon:
The Republican Party, particularly in the House, has turned into the legislative equivalent of North Korea — a political outlier so extreme it has lost the ability to achieve its objectives through normal political means. Its only recourse is to threats (increasingly believable) that it will blow up the system rather than countenance this-or-that lapse from conservative dogma
This behavior, of course, is driven by the character of the base Republican primary voters--the Frankenstein willfully created and nurtured that has now run amok:
But the Republican electorate is now almost as purified as the Republican Party. Not only is it unlikely to support Democratic candidates, it’s virtually certain to punish any Republican politician who works with Democrats.
According to the
Wall Street Journal, the contrived "IRS" scandal has provided a new jolt of electricity into the Tea Party Monster, and there is no reason to suspect its influence is on the wane. But it's unclear whether this will have a more negative impact on Republicans or Democrats:
Brad Woodhouse, president of the liberal Americans United for Change and former communications director at the Democratic National Committee, says the tea party's renewed fervor won't translate to broader gains for the Republican Party. "The Republicans are already losing August, because they are fighting with each other…whipsawed between establishment and extreme factions," he says.