With the 2010 campaign over, Washington can start to do what it does best \u2013 obsess on the next campaign.\u00a0 And here is an early bulletin:\u00a0 Each party enters the cycle deeply split.<\/p>\n
Everyone knows about the divide between Tea Party Republicans and party moderates.\u00a0 Some of this division is over policy.\u00a0 The Tea Partiers and those who sympathize with them were enraged at run-ups in federal spending and deficits between 2000 and 2006, when Republicans controlled the White House and, for much of the time, the two houses of Congress.<\/p>\n
So the GOP\u2019s decision in both chambers last week to renounce earmarks, at least for the coming congress, is a good sign that the party\u2019s congressional leaderships heard the election\u2019s command: Cut spending; restore limited government.<\/p>\n
Critics scoff that earmarked budget items total a small part of national outlays, one or two percent.\u00a0 But earmarks have become legal tender for buying votes in Congress \u2013 as in, you vote for this bill, I\u2019ll give you that earmark.\u00a0 There is a rule in economics: more money, more inflation.\u00a0 And sure enough, as Congress\u2019s play money has proliferated, the much-too-serious budgets that that money buys have inflated, massively.<\/p>\n
Still, there are holdouts in the anti-earmark revolution.\u00a0 Alaska\u2019s newly reelected senator Lisa Murkowski has announced she will continue to seek them. California congressman Jerry Lewis has fought reform.\u00a0 Both are on their body\u2019s appropriations committee and have history of across the aisle solidarity in support of spending.<\/p>\n
And yet the Republican split goes beyond attitudes about the budget.<\/p>\n
Starting with Richard Nixon and accelerating under Ronald Reagan, the GOP pulled previously Democratic groups \u2013 particularly southern Baptists and Irish Catholics \u2013 into its orbit.\u00a0 At the same time, some old line Protestants \u2013 groups that had dominated the party for a century — began moving towards the Democrats.<\/p>\n
These related but still distinct \u201cTea Party versus moderate\u201d and \u201cold party versus new party\u201d conflicts proved largely constructive for the GOP this past year.\u00a0 But early rumblings for next time sound more ominous.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t take much imagination to envision how the shifting of political tectonic plates could open up an unbridgeable fault line in the year ahead.<\/p>\n
The Democrats\u2019 split could prove just as deep, maybe deeper.<\/p>\n
In 2008, the mainstream media portrayed the Clinton-Obama primary battle as turning on everything but, with one exception, what it actually turned on.\u00a0 They were all agog at Mr. Obama\u2019s oratorical style, at his use of technology and social networking, at his post Baby Boomer age.\u00a0 All of this was interesting, but once the campaign got going was more or less immaterial.\u00a0 Instead, 2008 proved a replay of 1984, the year when Gary Hart faced off against Walter Mondale.<\/p>\n
Remember that the first time the media talked about \u201cyuppies\u201d \u2013 young urban professionals \u2013 was during the Hart campaign.\u00a0 Mondale drew from the old union and blue-collar base of the party (including African-Americans), Hart from a new, upscale, hip element.\u00a0\u00a0 And as there were more blue-collar voters, Mondale prevailed.<\/p>\n
In 2008, Mr. Obama drew the Hart voters and Mrs. Clinton attracted the Mondale ones.\u00a0 Except this time, the yuppie faction was larger, the union faction smaller, and, thanks to Mr. Obama\u2019s ethnicity, African-Americans switched sides.\u00a0 In state after state, the balance in the strength of these competing factions determined which candidate won the presidential primary.<\/p>\n
A peculiar trait of the Obama administration has been a tendency to champion policies that attack key elements of their support, particularly their intra-party support.\u00a0 For example, it is widely believed that Wall Street sided heavily with the president in 2008, giving financial backing that was critical to his nomination and election.\u00a0 Yet he has gone out of his way to demonize the financial community.\u00a0 More broadly, his Hart-like base within the party is upscale.\u00a0 Yet in the tax debate he has set the threshold for the rich so low as to catch a sizable portion of this faction in the critical peak-earning years of their career.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Democrat\u2019s industrial blue-collar faction is unhappy with the performance of the economy, not to mention the appearance of indecision in national security matters.\u00a0 \u00a0And voter repudiation of the last two years earlier this month has begun moving the Democrat\u2019s own tectonic plates.\u00a0 Last week Svengalian billionaire George Soros reportedly told big dollar party donors that it might be time for another change at the top.<\/p>\n
Not since 1860 have we had two major parties so deeply at odds with themselves going into a presidential election.\u00a0 There is time yet for each side to pull together.\u00a0 But chances are that one of these intra-party divides or both will play a decisive role in the 2012 campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the 2010 campaign over, Washington can start to do what it does best \u2013 obsess on the next campaign.\u00a0 And here is an early bulletin:\u00a0 Each party enters the cycle deeply split. Everyone knows about the divide between Tea Party Republicans and party moderates.\u00a0 Some of this division is over policy.\u00a0 The Tea Partiers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[42,45,12,46,44,43],"class_list":["post-779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-2012-election","tag-democrats","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-party-split","tag-republicans","tag-tea-party"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":960,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions\/960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}