Tag: gop civil war

Ooh, I think that somebody may be a little upset.

The civil war in the Republican Party is so civil. At least on the Senate battlefield, the much-anticipated and contentious intraparty fights are not happening. After the GOP primaries in North Carolina and Nebraska, the grassroots conservatives of the Tea Party and elites of the GOP establishment can both claim victories, but the real winners for the moment are the forces of order.

Possibly not John Dickerson himself, but certainly many of the Democrats that read him.  It’s a bad sign for a party when Democrats have to depend on the other side making mistakes – and at this point, the Republican party would have to start severely increasing the number of mistakes being made daily* – if the Democrats hope to keep the Senate.  Well, it’s not happening, is it? While neither the GOP grassroots nor the establishment want to admit that they had… suboptimal candidate procurement strategies… in 2012, well, both factions didn’t do as well then as they could have done.  Fortunately, both sides recognize that. Continue reading We Are One, Big Happy Fleet Watch: on the lack of a GOP civil war.

I want to be clear on this statement by John Dickerson about how both the utterly disastrous rollout and the unconscionably interfering provisions of Obamacare validated Republican warnings about the law (not that Dickerson had quite enough nerve to admit to Slate readers that we were right, and Obama was wrong):

It’s not just that Republicans benefit when the president’s signature legislation falters. This debate over his initial claim lends credibility to their longstanding opposition to the law. House Speaker John Boehner’s office quickly provided reporters with a quotation from the GOP weekly radio address from September 2009, delivered by Rep. Tom Price: “On the stump, the president regularly tells Americans that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.’ But if you read the bill, that just isn’t so. For starters, within five years, every health care plan will have to meet a new federal definition for coverage—one that your current plan might not match, even if you like it.” A key critique of the Republican Party’s recent attempt to defund Obamacare was that it was a strategy born of limited vision. They couldn’t see that it was doomed to fail spectacularly. Four years ago, with the Affordable Care Act, they saw this moment coming.

Continue reading Yes, the GOP saw the #obamacare crackup coming. No, we didn’t crack up, ourselves.