Harry Moroz
You And What Armey?
Former House majority leader and presumed head of the Tea Party movement Dick Armey should perhaps be congratulated for excommunicating the anti-immigrant zealot Tom Tancredo. When I talked several weeks ago with Freedom Works, the group Armey leads that is behind much Tea Party activity, a representative authorized to speak for Armey expressed similar sentiments, telling me that they were "worried about Tom Tancredo" who could alienate the "libertarian branch" of the movement.
The spokesman contrasted the failed candidacy of the (very) culturally conservative gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell in Ohio in 2006 to the surging (by his account) campaign of the (very, like eliminate the state income tax) fiscally conservative John Kasich. The implication is that Tea Party candidates will succeed if they can focus attention on so-called pocketbook issues, such as cap-and-trade, the stimulus package, and earmarks. But if attention turns to divisive cultural issues, of which immigration is presumed to be one, the Tea Party will shatter like so many delicate teacups.
But Armey, calculating strategist that he is, is not merely protecting his movement from the internal fissures that might result from disagreement about a single issue (and from a debate that would likely feature fear mongering, false patriotism, and overheated, mean-spirited rhetoric). Instead, he is protecting the very strategic consistency of the movement. The Tea Party's success, in fact, depends on stoking Americans' distrust of government by framing issues negatively, by presenting what the federal government should not do: own auto companies, pick winners and losers in the financial industry, "kill jobs" by passing cap-and-trade legislation. Debating immigration reform would concede that the federal government can and should do something. There is no "get the federal government out of immigration" position available to the Tea Partiers.
For now, Republicans sit back and court the Tea Party vote with diatribes about the "horrifying" stimulus package and the "Ponzi scheme" that is the federal government's fiscal policy. Yet, they offer very little in the way of an approach to governance, something that talking about immigration reform - about the adjustments to the immigration status quo - would force them to do. After all, if the federal government should handle immigration, couldn't it be trusted to accomplish other tasks?
The Tea Party is falling short electorally because it is built on a false premise: that political engagement can be purely oppositional, purely deconstructive. The hollowness of this premise is demonstrated best by Republican governors who - past, present, and future - all rail against a federal government whose aid they enjoy and even beg for.
As governor, even the most strident opponents of Washington - even the Mark Sanfords who write op-eds entitled "Don't Bail Out My State" - must say yes on a regular basis: yes to compromises on a balanced budget, yes to federal aid to prevent service cuts, yes to enforcement of myriad state financial and consumer protection laws, yes to everything associated with stability, pragmatism, and serving the people. Even Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a likely presidential candidate in 2012 who earned the nickname "godfather of 'no'" for his record 34 vetoes in 2008 (a post-World War II record), must compromise at times. In fact, in the year that Pawlenty set the veto record, one Democratic-Farmer-Labor state senator stressed that governance the previous year had been worse: "There were times last year that it seemed he was governing by veto instead of negotiating. This year's budget negotiations were built on the things we could agree on."
"If you run for governor, you have to be pragmatic," Nathan Daschle, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, told me recently. "You have to be more concerned with results than rhetoric." But such pragmatism is absent from the Tea Party and the Republicans catering to it.
It is dismaying enough to congratulate a conservative leader for merely eschewing a hateful politician. But, even if he believes them (and it is almost certain he does), Armey's statements about Tancredo are consistent with a movement that undermines trust in government even as it seeks to govern. No wonder Tea Party candidates are struggling .
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Posted at 5:04 PM, Mar 10, 2010 in
Governmental Reform
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