{"id":4922,"date":"2005-08-08T13:42:26","date_gmt":"2005-08-08T17:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4922.html"},"modified":"2005-08-08T13:42:26","modified_gmt":"2005-08-08T17:42:26","slug":"the-bubble-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-bubble-party\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bubble Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ron Brownstein had an excellent column<\/a> today on the Republicans’ powerful position and the inherent risks therein. As Brownstein put it, Republicans appear, at times, to “confuse consensus in their coalition with consensus in the country.”<\/p>\n

Steering solely by the preferences of Republicans can lead the party toward policies far less popular outside their coalition — such as intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo or Bush’s push to restructure Social Security.<\/p>\n

That helps explain why the approval ratings for Bush and Congress are sinking ominously this year, especially among independents, even amid legislative achievements.<\/p>\n

Republicans are talking mostly to each other now. But to maintain power, they may need to broaden the conversation before long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And there’s the rub: Republicans don’t want to. Just as the president embraces “Bubble Boy” policies and refuses to even be in the same room as those who might disagree with him, the rest of the party is following his example. Indeed, we’re looking at a “Bubble Party” that’s more than satisfied talking to themselves and pretending no one else exists.<\/p>\n

Consider the GOP summer retreat<\/a>, held over the weekend.<\/p>\n

The theme of the Republican Party’s summer meeting this weekend was expanding its base. The keynote speaker was a GOP senator who blames radical feminism for wrecking the home, equates same-sex marriage with bestiality, finds public schools suspect and believes that abortion is worse than slavery. <\/p>\n

Republicans see no inconsistency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course they don’t. For today’s GOP, “expanding the base” doesn’t mean reaching out to moderates and independents; it means motivating more right-wingers to join the cause.<\/p>\n

It’s worked fairly well in the very recent past, but in order for Republicans to keep their hold on power, it seems they’ll have to hope desperately for three things: 1) that the remaining moderates don’t get sick of the party’s radical direction; 2) that there are still persuadable conservatives out there who haven’t been reached; and 3) that the backlash to their agenda is smaller than wave of right-wing activists they bring in. A problem with any combination of the three would burst the bubble rather dramatically.<\/p>\n

2006 will be an interesting test, won’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ron Brownstein had an excellent column today on the Republicans’ powerful position and the inherent risks therein. As Brownstein put it, Republicans appear, at times, to “confuse consensus in their coalition with consensus in the country.” Steering solely by the preferences of Republicans can lead the party toward policies far less popular outside their coalition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}