October
8, 2013 U.S. Fringe Festival By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
There
is one group of people with an even greater interest than Democrats in
President Obama prevailing over Tea Party Republicans in this shutdown
showdown, and that is mainstream Republicans.
What
exactly are supposedly mainstream conservatives — starting with House Speaker
John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — thinking? If the “Ted
Cruz Wing” of the G.O.P. prevails and forces the president to curtail Obamacare
in any way in return for funding the government, mainstream conservatives will
be staring at a terrible future. In the near term, they’ll be taking orders
from Senator Ted Cruz, who would be crowned kingmaker of the G.O.P. if he got
Obama to give in one iota on Obamacare. Cruz and his Tea Party allies would be
calling the shots, and Boehner would become that very rare bird — a SPINO (a
Speaker in Name Only).
In
the long run, because this fringe would be dictating the party line,
Republicans would stand zero chance of winning the White House in 2016. If the
country rejected Mitt Romney’s bad imitation of a far-right conservative — one
hostile to immigration reform, health care, gay marriage and a grand bargain —
imagine how the real thing would fare.
Finally,
given the way the Republicans have managed to gerrymander so many Congressional
districts in their favor, they can easily retain control of the House under any
normal economic conditions. But if they trigger a U.S. government default, a
disruption in Social Security payments and economic turmoil in their effort to
scuttle Obamacare — and a majority of voters blame Republicans — that could
overwhelm the G.O.P.’s gerrymandered House advantage.
In
other words, the only thing standing between mainstream Republicans and a
hellish future of kowtowing to Ted Cruz, never seeing the inside of the White
House and possibly losing the House is President Obama’s refusal to give in to
the shutdown blackmail that Cruz & Co. have cooked up. The more pragmatic
Republicans, who know that this is a disaster for their party but won’t
confront Cruz & Co., have settled on this bogus line: “Well, sure, maybe
Cruz and the Tea Party went too far, but it’s still President Obama’s fault.
He’s president. He should negotiate with them. He needs to lead.”
President
Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of
any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail,
because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the
bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be
heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that
once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted — and, if legally
challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor — the majority
decision holds sway. A minority of a minority, which has lost every democratic
means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if
its demands are not met. If we do not preserve this system, nothing will ever
be settled again in American politics. There would be nothing to prevent a
future Democratic Congress from using the exact same blackmail to try to
overturn a law enacted by their Republican rivals.
The
president has said that he would give the G.O.P. an agenda for negotiations
that could start when the government is funded and the debt ceiling lifted.
He’s ready to consider trading the medical-device tax in Obamacare for another
equivalent source of revenue or having a talk about closing tax loopholes and
reforming entitlements — to both lower the deficit and raise revenue to invest
in infrastructure or early childhood education. What Obama will not do, and
must not do, is pay an entry fee to that negotiation — say giving up the medical-device
tax — just to help Boehner down from the tree. Cruz & Co. would claim
victory.
The
reason so many mainstream Republican lawmakers want Obama to give something to
Cruz & Co. is that they want to get out of this mess, but they’re all
afraid to stand up to the far-right fringe themselves — with its bullying
network of barking talk-show hosts and moneymen. But Obama shouldn’t take them
off the hook. Only Republicans can delegitimize the nihilistic madness at the
base of their party. (I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I think Boehner
underestimates how many mainstream Republicans feel their party is being stolen
from them by radicals — and hunger for a leader who will take them on.)
For
their party’s sake and the country’s sake, Republicans need to go through the
same kind of civil war and fundamental rethinking that the British Labour Party
went through — after successive defeats by Margaret Thatcher — to produce “New
Labour” and that Democrats went through — after successive defeats by Ronald
Reagan — to produce “Clinton Democrats.”
Yes,
it will cost them today, but it will enable them to thrive in the future.
America needs a proper right-of-center conservative party to challenge a
left-of-center Democratic Party. Without a healthy opposition party — one that
is ready to win some and lose some and learn from its losses, one that has a
real agenda for upward mobility, not just a low-tax obsession and boiling anger
— our two-party system doesn’t work, and neither does the country.
