I think the Republicans just won’t get it – collectively speaking – until it’s way too late:
The suggestion Thursday by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that his party could fall short of taking control of the chamber this fall — in part because of “candidate quality” — is not sitting well with some conservatives in his party.
Stephen Miller, a former senior aide to former president Donald Trump, said McConnell is the one to blame for prospects of a Republican takeover of the Senate that are “shrinking every single day.”
“We are witnessing in real time the greatest self-inflicted wound we have ever seen,” Miller said during an appearance on Fox News.
Miller asserted that McConnell has been focused on picking candidates that he thinks will help him stay in leadership and faulted him for not trying to create a national referendum on immigration and other issues. [WaPo]
McConnell, for all of his own flaws, comes from an earlier generation of Repubilcans, and at least is seeing the relationship between general characteristics of candidates and the expectations of the electorate, and speaking of it.
Those who are complaining about him? They’re the youngsters who were brought up sucking on former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s (R-GA) philosophy that winning elections is the end-all, be-all goal.
In other words, their metric is winning elections.
And that’s what they’ve been doing with the philosophy we’ve seen developed and implemented from the days of that quitter, Gingrich. Briefly, it consists of extremism, dismissal of expertise and experience and competency, single issue voting, and, paramount, the pursuit of power at the expense of everything else.
This synergy has worked in many geographical areas. The single issue voting over such issues as gun rights, abortion, taxation, and regulation provided the pivot around which extremism and incompetency could achieve office. Once in office, well, that was the goal, now wasn’t it?
Actual governing, which is the proper metric, was ignored. Anyone who observed the Trump Administration, and the GOP in the two Congresses of the same time period, knows this to be true. You don’t need to take my word for it, the reality is unavoidable. For even more examples, visit the GOP during the Bush II and Obama Administrations. It was party time, as they say.
But what of those complaining about McConnell? They are the conservatives brought up under the Gingrich political dictums, and, for most, it’s all they know. And they saw success using those rules, that philosophy, didn’t they?
And so they’ve been blinded by the wrong metric, that of winning elections, because the activities behind winning elections has resulted in both a changed electorate and candidates with different characteristics.
The electorate has seen Roe overturned by Dobbs, and the stories of the struggles of women forced to carry dead or terminally flawed fetuses to term, of raped little girls having to travel across State lines to get an abortion, all to satisfy the pretentious egos of politicos who think they know the mind of a divinity with which there has never been a verified communications. They’ve seen gun violence that had been falling begin to climb again, their children gunned down on the streets, ghost guns coming into use, and self-righteous and indignant gun owners proclaiming everyone should have one.
And the candidates are those who’ve successfully used the RINOing tactic to be rid of Republican moderates, where those moderates are yesterday’s radicals, now no longer in comparison to the religious zealots who can’t believe the Constitution has an Establishment clause, such as Rep Boebert (R-CO) and gubernatorial candidate Mastriano (R-PA). Their ranks have been growing for years: Gosar, Greene, Gohmert, and many more, all are familiar to those who pay attention to their absurd antics and recognize them for power-mad fools. I still like Greene’s Jewish Space Lasers.
The chemistry between candidates and audience has changed.
But these folks aren’t going to figure it out. No one likes to second-guess their own success. So McConnell will continue to take the flak for the mistakes of Miller, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), and many others who have clung to Gingrich’s precepts or Trump’s knees or their own overweening egos.
And, I suspect, they will go down screaming in November, screaming about cheating and McConnell and anything else but their own broken ideologies. They’ll be broken politicos, lost in their life vests as the American electorate takes a turn they didn’t expect and don’t understand.
