A lot of America is disgusted with the performance of the Republican Party in Washington over the last few weeks, no one more so than the conservatives at The Wall Street Journal. Daniel Henninger’s column this morning marveled at the party’s cluelessness:
What do children know that the Republicans in Congress don’t know? The kids know, because it is the mother’s milk of their battery-powered lives, that if you don’t recognize shifts in the mighty flows of information, you will be swept aside, abandoned. You will beBlackBerry….
Blackberry? Whoa, that is way harsh, dude. But read on:
Now suddenly comes a marketing ploy from the GOP’s backbenches: “DefundObamaCare.” This idea was supposed to rally the nation against the Affordable Care Act. So if you were to ask students in marketing at the local community college what they thought of “Defund ObamaCare,” what do you guess they might say? They’d say, absent the product, it sounds like a niche strategy with a low sales ceiling. Defund ObamaCare is now the Republicans’ New Coke.
Want a look at how a pro is spinning the Washington mess? Punch into Twitter.com and type “Barack Obama” into the search window. Click on “Barack Obama,” next to the “End This Now” logo. The Obama tweets the past week have been fairly amazing. As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda….
Republicans complain constantly that the media “lets him get away with it.” The media is floating down the electric river. No, they—the message-impoverished Republicans—let him get away with it. The Washington GOP is now a political Gulliver, tied down by tweets and twerps.
A month ago, before the congressional Republicans’ General Custer Caucus used “Defund ObamaCare” to vote themselves into their current, bullet-riddled fort, the Obama characterization of the entire GOP as “tea party Republicans” would have been a pathetic stretch. He was the one being laughed at by the whole world for his vanishing red lines in Syria and a foreign policy that even his own defense secretary described as “swinging from vine to vine.”…
And that’s what hurts most on the right. Obama was on the ropes just weeks ago. So the GOP, brainlessly and unnecessarily, hands him a month-long crisis in which he totally comes out on top. General Custer Caucus, indeed.
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I thought your earlier analogy to Pickett was better. I always thought Gen. Custer was simply ambushed by a larger force than he expected. Kind of a caught unawares situation.
Gen. Pickett just charged up a hill thinking (incorrectly) that Napoleonic battle tactics could still be used against then-modern firearms.
That reminds me. I’ve got a copy of The Last Stand at home, which I haven’t read yet…
The Slate is reporting something that closely matches Henninger’s fears:
The Democrats have had a good run the last few weeks. At least in the arena of popular opinion. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the vote to end the shutdown/ raise the debt ceiling really was a substantive victory for Republicans. But they turned a substantive victory into a huge strategic defeat. How? They won a major victory early on by getting the Democrats to agree on the sequester level spending limits. They should have jumped at the chance to waive the victory flag over that. Think of the propaganda coup they had in their hand.
But noooooo. They tried to reach too far by going after the holy grail of Obama’s presidency. That was simply a non-starter for them. And it ended up costing them dearly in the arena of public opinion. It even managed to increase the public’s approval for the ACA! And best of all this managed to distract the public’s attention away from the shaky rollout of the exchanges. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Whatever the merits of the Tea Party’s arguments they were swamped by their inept attempt to do the impossible. I guess Christine O’donnell is not the only incompetent witch in the Tea Party movement. And these are the folks conservatives want as commander in chief of the military? Wow now that’s a very scary thought.