The GOP Civil War Is On

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we can set down a marker by today's date as the day the GOP Civil War truly began.Santorum At CPAC: ‘Absolutely We Hope That’ Obama Fails, ‘I Believe His Policies Will Fail’

As I mentioned in my big weekend update, this past weekend was the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering of movement conservatives in DC. The update chronicled all kinds of craziness at the event, but it was written before Rush Limbaugh delivered his closing speech to the group, so I knew that there was a better than even chance that things would get even crazier. But even I didn't expect this....

Limbaugh's speech was originally scheduled for 15 minutes, but in Chavez-like fashion he carried on for well over an hour, no doubt in part because both CNN and Fox covered it live and without commercial interruption. I couldn't make it through the entire thing, and frankly you shouldn't even try. A few excerpts are more than enough to highlight just how nuts this guy is, and more importantly, just how disastrous his influence is going to be on his party.

Here's the first one:

Everybody asks me — and I’m sure it’s been a focal point of your convention — well, what do we do, as conservatives? What do we do? How do we overcome this? … One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas. […]

Our own movement has members trying to throw Reagan out while the Democrats know they can’t accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters. We have got to stamp this out within this movement because it will tear us apart. It will guarantee we lose elections.

The party of ideas? That's for losers! Under Limbaugh, the GOP will be the party of fighting and winning. It will  win because it fights, and it will fight because that is how you win. Ideas? Those are for librul girlie men. Or something.

And here's the second one:

Limbaugh warned that Republicans should not let concerns about racial insensitivities limit criticism of Obama's policies. "It doesn't matter to me what his race is. He's liberal, and that's what matters." 

"The racism in our culture was exclusively and fully on display in the Democrat primary last year," Limbaugh said. "We didn't ask if he was authentically black. What we were asking, was, 'Was he wrong?' We concluded, 'Yes.' " 

"The racism, the sexism, the bigotry that we are all charged with ... doesn't exist on our side," he added. "We want everybody to succeed." 

That's so silly, I'm going to let Steve Benen's response stand in for mine.

Finally, the third and fourth excerpts come from the end of the speech, when the event organizers awarded Rush their Defender of the Constitution Award. Here's what the award presenter had to say:

The king of England sat with his advisers, and they read the writings of Ben Franklin. They said, “The colonists will never be successful if they read what he writes.” Just as the king’s successor, who is in the White House, said the other day, that conservatives will never be successful if they listen to Rush Limbaugh. The only way we will be successful is if we listen to Rush Limbaugh!

And what did the Constitution's Defender have to say in response? Among other things, he claimed that the Preamble to the Constitution included words from the Declaration of Independence, and in the process, he even managed to get the words wrong!

We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. [Applause] Liberty, Freedom. [Applause] And the pursuit of happiness.

 

Now on its own, none of this would be a sign of civil war within the party. But in context, I think the conclusions is absolutely unavoidable.

The first excerpt showed Limbaugh attacking the idea that the Republican Party should be the party of ideas. That was a direct attack on Newt Gingrich, who has recently been positioning himself for a 2012 run based almost entirely on his reputation as a "man of ideas." It was, as just one small example, the entire premise of his CPAC speech this weekend. For the record, here's Newt's 12 point plan:

1. Payroll Tax Stimulus
2. Real Middle-Income Tax Relief
3. Reduce the Business Tax Rate
4. Homeowner's Assistance
5. Control Spending So We Can Move to a Balanced Budget
6. No State Aid Without Protection From Fraud
7. More American Energy Now (Energy exploration)
8. Abolish Taxes on Capital Gains
9. Protect the Rights of American Workers (from ... Unions)
10. Replace Sarbanes-Oxley
11. Abolish the Death Tax
12. Invest in Energy and Transportation Infrastructure

Now sure, I agree completely with Steve Benen that Newt's "ideas" are anything but new, but given that I'm not the intended audience for his plan, that doesn't much matter. The people at CPAP, including Rush Limbaugh, are his intended audience, and it appears that they have rejected them outright.

But notice what is happening here. This isn't a rejection of Newt's ideas, or of Newt himself. This is a rejection of ideas in general. For reasons I cannot fathom, Rush is deliberately creating a cleavage within his party around the idea of ideas. On one side, you've got people like Newt who think the party needs to offer new solutions to the nation's new problems. On the other side, you've got people like Rush and the CPAC masses who think that ideas are irrelevant.

And now, thanks in part to efforts like Rahm's and in part to the way political media is naturally drawn to controversy, Republican officials are being forced to take sides. Are you with Rush or against him?

On Sunday, it was House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, who, like SC Gov. Mark Sanford just a few days before, was forced to distance himself from Rush's professed desire to see Obama fail:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So the Rush Limbaugh approach of hoping the President fails is not the Eric Cantor/House Republican approach?

CANTOR: George, absolutely not. I don’t think anyone wants anything to fail right now. We have such challenges. What we need to do is put forth solutions to the problems that real families are facing today.

Unfortunately for Cantor and his party, it isn't just Rush who is openly rooting for Obama to fail. Michelle Malkin, Rick Santorum, and Tom DeLay have all gone on record in just the past few days to loudly proclaim a similar position. 

Notice the dynamic here? On one side you have talk radio personalities and out of work politicians, each of whom have nothing to lose and much to gain by using bombastic rhetoric. On the other side, you have currently serving elected officials, each of whom has everything to lose and nothing to gain by rooting against a very popular president. That gives us both a deep ideological cleavage (ideas vs. no ideas) and two committed and well organized opponents (talkers vs. elected officials).

All that's missing is for the head of the GOP to weigh in, and well... Take a look at what ThinkProgress caught last night:

Last night, RNC Chairman Michael Steele appeared on D.L. Hughley’s show on CNN and disputed Hughley’s statement that Rush Limbaugh “is the de facto leader of the Republican Party.” “I’m the de facto leader of the Republican Party!” Steele insisted. Steele admitted that Limbaugh’s shtick is “incendiary” and “ugly”:

STEELE: So let’s put it into context here. Let’s put it into context here. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it’s incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly.

And now put it together with this from CPAC:

And I’ve got to say a few words about the Right in this situation too because sometimes we get what we deserve on this issue because we are oftentimes a lot of cowards. We don’t stand up for our own, we don’t stand up for what we believe, we allow ourselves to be tortured in the news media and a lot of us end up selling out to the other side for a guest spot on Meet The Press or Larry King Live because they know that a conservative saying something bad about another conservative is automatically going to be newsworthy and get them a higher profile. Well, those people ought to be ostracized and punished.

And that, my friends, is what the beginning of a civil war looks like. If Rush wins, the party is doomed. If he does not, it will only be because Republican elites purged him from their party. Because as CPAC just finished demonstrating, Rush has the masses on his side, and the masses are apparently ready to rumble.

But don't take my word for it. Take a look at what no less than David Frum has to say today:

Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging: 

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership?

And the worst part for the GOP? This whole thing is going to take years to unfold. Years, not months. Years....

UPDATE: George Packer provides some context:

This clip from the weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference reminds me exactly of what meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America sounded like in the nineteen-eighties. Just substitute “free-market capitalism” for “big government,” “the New Deal” for “the era of Reagan,” and everything else—the defensive contempt toward popular rule, the retreat into the comfort of a purified “philosophy,” the denunciations of unnamed appeasers within the ranks, the call to “stamp out” middle-way weaklings—is the same. I attended some of those conferences. With each year they became more righteous and more insular, and I remember exactly what it felt like to know that my side was going to be the losing side for years to come. I remember looking around at my fellow democratic socialists and wondering whether I really even belonged there.

So if there were any quietly doubting conservatives at the CPAC conference, they have my sympathy, and a bit of unsolicited advice: the biggest obstacle to your eventual return to power is the kind of resistant and intolerant politics embodied so amply in the man at the podium.

My prediction is that, in the short term—between now and at least 2012—this spirit will dominate the Republican Party, until the doubters become numerous and brave enough to make trouble. The very seriousness of the stakes in Obama’s gamble will drive most conservatives into an increasingly fanatical and self-isolating opposition.