(08-27-2024 10:12 AM)bullet Wrote: The Tea Party's success killed the Tea Party. They made the House competitive after 40 years of Democratic total control and 60 of 64. They forced Clinton to balance the budget, the first balanced budget in decades. Of course the war on Terror and the 2008 recession blew the lid off fiscal responsibility.
The TEA Party did not really come to be until after the War on Terror and 2008 recession blew the lid off fiscal responsibility. The HOR became competitive from 1994 onward due to Newt's Contract, which embodied a lot of the same principles that the TEA Party later embraced. And the pre-1992 Bill Clinton was more amenable to a balanced budget than democrats as a whole, so he triangulated republicans against democrats to balance the budget. Unfortunately democrats abandoned fiscal responsibility totally after Clinton, and GWB did nothing to oppose them, ultimately producing the War on Terror and the 2008 crash.
The TEA (taxed enough already) Party rose to prominence as a reaction in opposition to the policies that produced the 2008 crash. The first event I attended that was organized by what became the TEA Party was a bipartisan rally in mid-2008 in favor of a proposal by a group of republican congresspersons that would in my estimation have severely limited the harm done by the 2008 crash. That proposal was opposed by both GWB and John McCain in favor of policies that, again in my estimation, made the crash worse.
The TEA Party was pretty much undone by its own success. After the 2008 election, it was pretty much the only thing republicans had going for them. So Mitch and the RINOS declared themselves to be TEA Partiers, without adopting any of the TEA Party principles. They basically undid all they had going for them.
Trump in 2016 revived a lot of the TEA Party sound bytes. So Mitch and the RINOS had to undo it again. By 2020 there were a lot of RINOS who would rather see Joe Biden as president than Donald Trump as head of the republican party. I fear that in 2024 a lot of them would rather see Kamala the **** as president than Donald Trump as head of the republican party.
At this point I believe that the republicans would be better served by adopting a set of issue positions that combine fiscal responsibility with blue collar jobs. In so doing they would effectively be telling a lot of RINOS goodbye, but I think the middle class votes they would pick up would far outweigh the RINO losses.
Republicans need to make it about issues instead of personalities, but I am afraid that with Donald Trump it will always be about personalities. I think they need to focus on senate and HOR races, and run issue-based campaigns for them, basically the Newt/Contract model from 1994. Most projections seem to show republicans picking up 2-3 senate seats, giving them 51-52, and holding a narrow majority in the HOR. If they could move the senate number to 54-55 seats, and increase the HOR number to a working majority, then they could put a halt to most of the democrats' destructive policies. Then work on holding serve in 2026 and making a big push for the white house in 2028. But the key to me is making it issues-based and adopting common-sense policies that promote fiscal responsibility and middle-class jobs.
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[NEWS] “kill that [MAGA] strain of the Republican Party”
