The New Repubican Right
By DICK MORRIS
Published on
TheHill.com on October 20, 2010
A fundamental change is gripping the Republican grass roots as they
animate the GOP surge to a major victory in the 2010 elections. No
longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground
troops. Now economic and fiscal issues prevail. The Tea Party has made
the Republican Party safe for libertarians.
There is still a litmus test for admission to the Republican Party. But
no longer is it dominated by abortion, guns and gays. Now, keeping the
economy free of government regulation, reducing taxation and curbing
spending are the chemicals that turn the paper pink.
It is one of the fundamental planks in the Tea Party platform that the
movement does not concern itself with social issues. At the Tea Parties,
evangelical pro-lifers rub shoulders happily with gay libertarians. They
are united by their anger at Obama's economic policies, fear of his
deficits and horror at his looming tax increases. Obama's agenda has
effectively removed the blocks that stopped tens of millions of social
moderates from joining the GOP.
As a byproduct of this sea change in the Republican Party, GOP
grassroots activists are no longer just concentrated in the South. They
are spread all throughout the nation, as prominent in Ohio as in
Alabama, in New York as in Georgia, in California as in Nevada.
The Tea Party's focus on fiscal and economic issues finds deep resonance
among voters of all stripes, united as they are in economic hardship and
disappointed as they all are by Obama's economic program. This antipathy
to federal policies is paving the way for vast Republican inroads in
normally solid Democratic turf like New York state, Massachusetts,
California and Washington state.
Fighting over abortion has become a cottage industry in America. As
useful to the left as to the right, both camps have used the issue for
30 years to demand orthodoxy of their constituents and fidelity from
their electorates. No longer does the pro-life/pro-choice debate hold
voters in blue states hostage to the Democratic Party, bound and
determined to swallow as much in regulation and taxation as their
liberal candidates offer if only to protect Roe v. Wade. Nor does it
hypnotize Southern or rural conservatives who grant their Blue Dog
congressmen a pass on Election Day as long as they are right on life,
guns and gays. Now these Blue Dogs are paying the price for their
betrayal of fiscal conservatism and find that they can no longer assuage
their angered base by way of ads showing them with firearms. While
social concerns still exist and are held deeply throughout the country,
economic and fiscal issues have gripped the hearts and minds of
Republican voters and candidates, pushing the social questions aside.
This preference for economic and fiscal questions over social issues is
not a top-down decision of the Tea Party leadership. There really is no
Tea Party leadership. Those who conduct its affairs are mere
coordinators of local groups where the real power lies. The entire
affair is a grass roots-dominated movement. I was shocked to learn that
the teapartypatriots.org umbrella group, to which more than 2,800 local
affiliates belong, has a total payroll of $50,000 per month, with only
seven paid staff members, some of them low-level at that. This group,
which embraces more than half of the self-described Tea Party groups in
the U.S., leaves up to each local organization how to proceed and what
to do. It is a bottom-up movement.
The determination to focus on fiscal and economic issues, to the
exclusion of social questions, wells up from below as individual members
vent their concerns over ObamaCare, stimulus spending and cap-and-trade
legislation. It is around opposition to Obama's agenda, not Roe v. Wade,
that the movement is organized. It is a new day on the Republican right.
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***COPYRIGHT EILEEN MCGANN AND DICK MORRIS 2010. ***
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