GOP campaigns: outsiders vs. insiders

19 June 2011 |permalink | email article

Time magazine’s Joe Klein accurately describes the struggle for the Republican Party’s soul now coming into clearer national focus. There is a jittery sense among Republican savants that Romney is a straw man, Klein writes, ready to be toppled, because the party has changed irrevocably. It has traded in country-club aristocracy for pitchfork populism. 

“The Tea Partyers and talk show hosts who define the new Republican Party believe in the opposite of primogeniture. They believe in the moral purity of political virginity. After Sarah Palin, amateurism has become a Tea Party hallmark. Herman Cain, the African-American business executive who was the Teasies’ flavor of the month – before the [New Hampshire] debate – emphasizes his total absence of governmental experience to roars of laughter and approval on the stump.

Quotable

“Well, I was more concerned about what the candidates in New Hampshire the other night said. This is isolationism. There has always been an insolation strain in the Republican Party. But now it seems to have moved more center stage. . . .If we had not intervened, Gadhafi was at the gates of Benghazi.” John McCain, on “This Week,” told by Christiane Amanpour that debaters seemed to be wavering on a traditional GOP position on national security. McCain said he wondered what Ronald Reagan would be saying today. “He would be saying that’s not the Republican Party of the 20th century, and now the 21st Century.”

“I would play chicken with the Legislature on this one.” Bruce Cain, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, saying Gov. Brown must reassert himself with lawmakers now if he hopes to distinguish himself from his predecessor and fulfill his campaign pledge. Brown has the power, he said. But the question remains whether he can use the veto as a hammer to effectively break the budget impasse.

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