Monday, May 01, 2023

The TEA Party and "No Labels" Are Intimately Connected

The Lincoln Project has two settings: one is to be afraid, BE VERY AFRAID, of Donald Trump. There is no room in that doom scenario for reasonable analysis like this: Unless LP gets to say: "AND IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN UNLESS YOU SUPPORT US!" Which, yeah, sounds very unironically like Donald Trump. Their other setting is: "Joe Biden is Great!" Being a yellow-dog Democrat, I obviously have no problem with that.

I was listening to another pundit on MSNBC (not a regular, didn't catch his name) express the same anxiety about "No Labels," that it will be a spoiler in the 2024 election, siphoning votes off of Biden. Oddly, the pundit didn't mention 1992 and Ross Perot; instead he went with Ralph Nader getting votes Gore presumably would have won in Florida, triggering a loss to Bush by 600 votes (the argument is Nader's votes would have gone to Gore and he'd have won Florida and the White House.  Of course, how did Gore let it come down to 600 votes in Florida against a Texas governor known only for his connection to Poppy, and labeled "Shrub" by Molly Ivins? Other theories are that Karl Rove was a super-genius, but victorious campaign consultants always convince the pundits it was their genius that won the day, even if they never win again, ever.).  Would those Nader voters have voted for Gore?  Or would they have just stayed home?  Who can say?

Likewise he pointed out that independent voters who wouldn't vote for Trump on a bet, went for Biden in 2020; but a "No Labels" candidate to be named later will suck away those votes, because...reasons.  Except the "No Labels" candidate has yet to emerge (voters vote for the person, not the label, or "no label"), and likely prospects are Joe Manchin and Joe Lieberman.  No Labels wants to field a Republican and a Democrat, to be "non-partisan."  But no "name" politican from either party is going to ruin their career that way, so it will be the XFL of the political parties, fielding people no one has ever heard of and won't be excited by.  Ross Perot got as far as he did because Clinton was an unknown from Arkansas labeled a womanizer, and Bush was...Bush.  Who wanted four more years of that?  I don't see a groundswell of support for Joe Manchin for POTUS; not when you already have Biden.  A third-party candidate has to offer an alternative (Perot; Nader), not, in Goldwater's memorable phrase, "an echo."

But I'm evading my thesis, which is that No Labels is as grassroots as the TEA Party was; and that's what the big money is gambling on.  I don't doubt for a minute that, as Rick Wilson argues, No Labels is a SuperPac for Trump.  But it's a group looking to catch lightning in the bottle one more time:  Trump did it in 2016 (mostly, I'd argue, because Hillary had too much baggage), and the TEA Party did it in 2009, mostly because of the example of Newt Gingrich, and at the funding and behest of what we could call the "Freedom Caucus" today, although the politicians involved were both officeholders and retirees.  Yes, it was pretty much dead by 2016, but No Labels is getting the band back together!  Which, I suspect, will go about as well as that cliche implies: not well at all.  (No, it's no coincidence the TEA Party ended in 2016 as Trump was ascendant.  It wasn't needed anymore: the Koch Brothers got what they wanted. ) But six years later, they don't have it anymore, so time to get the band back together.

Everything old is new again.  Or it's still old, which is what's happening here; and "old" is not always "true and trusted."  Especially with Millenials and Gen Z (or whatever they are; "no labels" would be a good thing to apply to "generations" about now; it's become ridiculous; or more ridiculous than it ever was).

I think Friedman is right about presidents and assholes:

In truth, Trump’s appeal is, or was, probably based less on just being an asshole than in getting America’s large share of angry, aging, conservative, mostly white people to feel “this asshole is on my side,” plus occasionally being funny.

But that distinction seems lost on figures like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, senators Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, presidential aspirants all, if not 2024 candidates. These folks may be secretly nicer than they pretend, but all seem to hope that publicly playing up any boorish qualities they share with the former president are a ticket to national polling success.

I think the other side of that is that four years of a boorish asshole is enough.  Trump has turned more clearly into a whiny old man who now claims China released covid-19 for the sole purpose of denying him a second term.  That it laid waste to China almost more than any country, and cost China greatly in its place among nations (it very nearly became a pariah state, and shut down its economy more frequently and harshly than almost any other country on the planet), or that that's like using a shotgun to kill a fly, never crosses the empty wastes of Trump's mind.  Nor does the fact that his response to the pandemic was useless, disjointed, pathetic, disastrous, and led to a higher death count than almost any other country on the planet, ever occur to him.  He lost, and China did it because it was so unfair that history didn't accord itself to give Trump an easy re-election.

I'm still trying to figure out how 8 years (by the time of the election) of public expose to this man is going to make him a more desirable figure to return to the White House.  He may have been elected because he was an asshole (it was at least certainly in spite of it), but being a thoroughly incompetent and idiotic asshole (he still doesn't understand taxpayers paid the tariffs he put on China, and that they didn't release covid to get back at him for that; yes, his "reasons" float about like dustmotes in a sunbeam) in the public eye has eroded his appeal to the voters who still vote GOP.   There may still be enough such people to vote for state officials who gerrymander the shit out of districts with the Supreme Court's blessing, but there aren't enough of them to put Trump back in office; with or without a "No Labels" candidate.

Besides, it's a long way to 2024, and you need all 50 states to do anything against an incumbent running against Donald Trump:

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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal8:22 AM

    I would only argue that someone who acts like that list of a-holes in public for political gain could be less of one otherwise. What they did is meta-a-holing. You have to be an a-hole to act like that much of one.

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