How America's Right was split by the great shutdown
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How America's Right was split by the great shutdown ... clear about who is the true enemy of American prosperity as they open their meeting ... in Washington] have been acting like Obama's best friends and now they've found ...
How America's Right was split by the great shutdown
It was the week in which the US government shut down for the first time in 17 years - and the subterranean fault-lines of the American Right burst into the open.
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Americans oppose using a government
shutdown to block implementation of Obamacare by 72 per cent to 22 per
cent, according to one survey. Photo: Reuters
1:14PM BST 05 Oct 2013
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On one side there was a Republican leadership that never wanted to shut down
the US government, and on the other; the no-compromise Tea Party wing that
demanded the shutdown as a stand against Barack
Obama's health care reforms – and got what it wanted.
As the shutdown enters its sixth day on Sunday, those divisions showed no
signs of healing as the White House and Democratic leadership refused to
accept a government funding bill with any strings attached.
And while the Right wrestled over its internal differences last week, Mr Obama
– a president whose personal ratings are in the doldrums after a
crisis-ridden start to his second term – wasted no time picking at the
cracks.
Taking full advantage of the presidential bully-pit, Mr Obama has openly
taunted John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house, urging him to
pass a spending bill by combining the votes of Democrats with realist
Republican members who have publicly said the shutdown has now gone on long
enough.
"The only thing that is keeping the government shut down," said Mr
Obama in a speech at a shutdown-affected construction company in Maryland, "is
that Speaker John Boehner won't even let the bill get a yes-or-no vote,
because he doesn't want to anger the extremists in his party. That's all.
That's what this whole thing is about."
But twenty-five miles outside Washington, in Chantilly, Virginia, the "extremists" Mr Obama says have the power to bring the world economy to a shuddering halt could be found gathering for a meeting over greasy pizza and flat Coca-Cola in a sparse community centre.
The activists of the "Virginians for Quality Healthcare" – a Tea Party-aligned group – are very clear about who is the true enemy of American prosperity as they open their meeting with a short invocation to the Lord to help them bring "liberty and justice to the American people".
"Americans have to stand ready for whatever Barack Obama throws at them," says Ron Wilcox, founder of the Northern Virginia Tea Party.
"We have to hold fast and Americans need to understand that they need to stand fast for liberty."
Like more than 70 per cent of Americans according to recent polls, none of the Virginia Tea Party activists believe the government shutdown is, in itself, a good thing – but they believe it is an unavoidable fight worth having to roll back the Affordable Care Act.
The legislation otherwise known as "ObamaCare" will require all Americans to purchase health insurance as part of its "individual mandate" but which Republicans consider an affront to individual liberty and a travesty of the US Constitution.
While Republican elders in Washington fear a repeat of the 1995-96 shutdown, when the party led by Newt Gingrich took the blame and revived Bill Clinton's ailing political fortunes, the Tea Party is rejoicing that finally battle has been joined.
"They [the Republican leadership in Washington] have been acting like Obama's best friends and now they've found some backbone," says Audrey Dutton, a Virginia housewife with a 'Repeal ObamaCare' sticker on her leopard-print handbag.
So what Mr Obama and the Democrat leadership in the Senate describe as blackmail, Mrs Dutton sees as Republicans taking a necessary "last stand" against the law. "It shows that even at this late hour we cannot let the American people down," she adds.
That is precisely the stance of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who has become the unofficial leader of the Tea Party wing in Congress and the most prominent in a group of Young Turks elected to Congress after 2010 on the back of conservative opposition to Mr Obama's health care reforms.
"ObamaCare is the biggest job killer in this country," Mr Cruz said during a 21-hour marathon speech against the health care law. "The American people want to stop this madness and so do I."
But while Mr Cruz is lauded by the Tea Party and the Republicans grassroots, the leadership in Congress has taken a different view, accusing him of picking a fight the party cannot win while handing Mr Obama a chance to paint all Republicans as dangerous obstructionists.
At one private lunch this week, Mr Cruz was assailed by senate colleagues demanding to know what his exit-strategy was after forcing the shutdown, and accusing him of backing a conservative group that has attacked 25 Republican senators for failing to support the Tea Party stance.
"It just started a lynch mob," one senator who was present told the *New York Times*, as news of the open dissent within GOP ranks drowned out Republican attempts to focus media attention on Mr Obama's refusal to negotiate.
Even Senator Rand Paul, another Tea Party favourite who has inherited his father's libertarian followers after the 2012 campaign, was caught on an open microphone strategising with senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admitting "I know we don't want to be here [in shutdown]" before discussing how to shift the blame onto Democrats.
Not surprisingly, Mr Obama has seized on the ammunition being provided. In the same Maryland speech, he quoted Marlin Stutzman, a conservative Congressman from Indiana who had admitted the Tea Party caucus did not really have a strategy at all.
"One House Republican said, "We're not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is." That was a quote," Mr Obama said, before repeating it for emphasis, "Think about that."
Pragmatic Republicans fear that voters will do just that if the shutdown is allowed to persist too long. It would allow Democrats to further demonise the party – much as Republicans were once able to do to Democrats before Bill Clinton dragged the party back to the centre.
"They're doing to Republicans among independent voters what Republicans had done to them for many years, with the word 'liberal'," a Republican senate aide told *The Sunday Telegraph*, "Democrats are inverting the brand so that you can label someone a 'Tea Party Republican' and that's an insulting epithet."
For establishment Republicans the failure to recapture the senate in 2012 is blamed on Tea Party politics that alienated the kind of independent voters that decide general elections.
The most obvious case was in Indiana, where Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party favourite easily unseated the moderate Dick Lugar in the Republican primary by vowing never to compromise with Democrats but then lost the previously rock-solid Republican seat by seven points in the general election.
"That's a prime example of Tea Party tactics costing us elections," said another Republican working on strategy for the 2014 midterm elections, who added that while the leadership was now desperately looking for a face-saving way out of the impasse, they were also keen not to see Mr Cruz rewarded.
"If Ted Cruz comes out of this looking like he won something in any way," he added, "then it just raises the stakes for next time."
But away from the febrile atmosphere on Capitol Hill, there are Republicans who are already taking up positions in anticipation that, when the dust settles on what the cable news networks call the "shutdown showdown", the Cruz brand of scorched-earth politics will ultimately not endure.
The most prominent of these is Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey who attracted the wrath of Republican grassroots for visiting the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy with Barack Obama just days before last year's general election, a move that was seen as damaging to Mitt Romney and designed to burnish Mr Christie's credentials for a run in 2016.
Mr Christie is one of 30 Republican governors who the GOP leadership holds up as the standard-bearers of a tough, results-oriented conservatism that can win over undecided voters at a time when the middle classes are still feeling little tangible benefits from the economic recovery.
It escaped no one's notice that Mr Christie, who is currently 24 points up in his November gubernatorial re-election race, chose this week to launch a new campaign advert trumpeting his credentials as a tough-guy who can reach across the aisle and get things done.
"Everything we've done has been a bipartisan accomplishment," Mr Christie says in the advert in his best tough-guy voice, "See, I think as long as you stick to your principles, compromise isn't a dirty word."
In Washington at least, it seems the jury is still out on that.
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