The GOP-Tea Party Merger Is Complete

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/23923-frank-rich-the-gop-tea-party-merger-is-complete

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell triumphed yesterday against a well-financed tea-party challenger in a race pundits had once predicted to be close. In Georgia, two GOP Establishment candidates moved on to a runoff, fending off three more hard-line opponents. What does this tell us about the state of the GOP going into the midterms? Is the era of Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, and the GOP Civil War truly over?

In the orgy of self-flagellation that followed the 2012 election, Bobby Jindal called the GOP “the stupid party.” The GOP is many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. It is learning how to weed out candidates who have “witch” on their résumé or talk about “legitimate rape.” But those who say the tea party is dead miss the point. The tea party is and always has been the Republican base: dedicated to obstructing and dismantling federal government, livid about Obama and all he represents about the country’s demographical change, and well to the country’s right on issues ranging from immigration reform to gay marriage. John Boehner had it right this week when he said there’s “not that big a difference between what you call the tea party and your average conservative Republican.” The motion was seconded by Matt Kibbe, the leader of the tea-party organization FreedomWorks, who said, “Everybody is running like a tea-party candidate now.”

In Kentucky, McConnell simply co-opted tea-party positions and tea partiers, starting with his hiring of Rand Paul’s campaign manager. (McConnell had backed Paul’s rival in the Republican senatorial primary of 2010.) McConnell’s general-election campaign will be run not against his actual opponent, the tough Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, but against Obama and Obamacare. Whatever the result of that race, the 2014 midterms, like 2010’s, are fertile territory for the GOP: The electorate tilts its way (white, old) in off-year elections. The Republicans could well retake the Senate. But when the dust clears in 2016, and Obama is headed toward retirement, the full electorate will see the stark alternatives the two parties represent. Thanks to the tea party’s victory in the GOP civil war, the Republicans will be as solidly a right-wing party as has been seen in a presidential year since the Barry Goldwater forces staged a similar coup in the GOP of 1964.