POLITCS-A couple of weeks ago, I suggested in a CityWatch column that the Democrats should adopt a strategy that would create a wedge between ordinary conservative voters and the elected crazies who represent them in the US congress.
According to the latest rumor, the Republicans are actually thinking about playing into that strategy, although their reasons for doing so are best described as deluded. The plan I laid out is for Senate Democrats to cut federal spending in the red states as a response to any and every crazy demand that the Republicans throw down. The Republicans in the House are actually talking about enacting legislation that would have the same effect.
The idea, according to a recent article in Talking Points Memo, is for the House Republicans to raise the debt ceiling in order to avert a catastrophic world wide economic collapse, but to continue the government shutdown. For Democratic strategists, it's "please don't throw me into the briar patch" all over again.
Here's why. Blowback against the government shutdown is real, and a lot of it is coming from places that the Republicans in congress didn't expect. The tourist industry, for example, is suffering terribly in places that feature federally funded battle fields, parks, and museums. Think about where a lot of those battlefields are located -- in southern states and rural Pennsylvania, where Civil War battles were fought.
Also think about all those federally funded positions held by civilians in southern forts and Nasa facilities. The House of Representatives has promised to give them their back pay (even though they are not working for it), but that promise could be delayed or even evaporate depending on what the Senate decides. In any case, that back pay issue has handed the more militant Democrats in the Senate their own cudgel to wield, should they choose to use it.
Veterans on pensions are getting worried, as are social security recipients. The damage to medical research has been real, and the results will last well beyond the end of the shutdown. If the Republicans in the House of Representatives stick by their guns and keep the government shut down, fears will mount, pressure will increase, and -- importantly -- the voters' opinion of the Republican Party will be damaged for a generation. There are lots of conservative voters who are suddenly discovering that as much as they like to vote for ultra-conservative Republicans, maybe they can't afford it.
It is the latter point that the Republican leadership should worry about. The party has narrowed itself largely to the old confederacy, some of the mountain states, and conservative rural areas. It has even managed to lose some of the old confederate states in recent presidential elections. Convincing a few voters in a few swing districts that Republican candidates are financially dangerous to them could lose the Republicans both houses of congress in the next election.
By now, a lot of Americans see the congressional Republicans as the group who take us to the brink every few months. If even a modest fraction of conservative voters begin to understand that this is not in their own interest, the result could be a new era in American politics. Voters tend to reject political parties that get too far outside of the broad center. The Democrats learned this lesson the hard way after 1968. Republicans appear to be blissfully mindless of it
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 82
Pub: Oct 11, 2013
