Saturday Night Fight Card: GOP Establishment v. Newt Insurgency

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The next episode of "Survivor – GOP Presidential Primary" will be co-hosted by ABC News, ABC5/WOI-DT, The Des Moines Register and the Republican Party of Iowa on Saturday, December 10 at 9:00 p.m. ET, from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. ABC News anchors Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos will moderate the debate.

This week the GOP establishment (Wall Street, old money) went into full panic mode over the sudden return of left-for-dead-last-June Newt Gingrich. The megalomaniac pseudo-intellectual, preeminent housing historian, and disgraced former Speaker of the House is suddenly the darling of the Christian Right (despite serial marital infedility and three marriages) and the Tea Party (despite being a flip-flopper as much as Willard "Mittens" Romney).

Why? Because Newt embodies the angry, mean-spirited, cocksure authoritarianism of the far-right of the GOP. These are the parasites who have taken over the GOP host and hollowed it out, replacing it with a radical extremist right. As I have said many times, "This is not your father's GOP." This is radical, extreme, and dangerous.

The GOP establishment has belatedly come to this realization, but it may already be too late. They have only themselves to blame for enabling this implosion of the GOP. Steve Benen writes at the Political Animal – The reach of the GOP establishment:

Ezra Klein makes the case today that the GOP establishment simply will not allow such an outcome.

There’s just no way the Republican establishment lets Gingrich become their nominee. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out today, you’re already seeing the anti-Gingrich mobilization among conservative thought leaders: Here’s George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Tom Coburn and Ann Coulter, just for starters. There’s this Politico story about all the Washington Republicans who hate Gingrich.

Now, I think it’s more likely that this mobilization leads to a Romney win then a brokered convention or a new entrant. But I think it makes a Gingrich win almost impossible to imagine.

Ezra didn’t even mention Karl Rove, who also seems eager to destroy Newt.

But I’m not convinced. There’s no doubt that the party’s establishment really does hate Gingrich, and has for quite a while. We’ve seen some of this enmity unfold of late, and the blowback is only going to intensify in the coming months, especially if the disgraced former House Speaker starts winning caucuses and primaries.

But following up on an item from Jon Chait earlier in the week, I’m not altogether sure the Republican establishment has the wherewithal to exert its will over the process. Indeed, the GOP’s powerful and elite routinely fail to get what they want from their part [e.g, Sharron "Second Amendment Remedies" Angle (NV), and Christine "I'm not a Witch" O'Donnell (CT)].

In 2008, the Republican establishment didn’t love John McCain — dirty little secret: the only people in Washington who really like McCain are Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, and television producers — and were mortified by Sarah Palin, but again, GOP elites weren’t in a position to pull the strings to their liking.

In fact, I find it very easy to imagine Gingrich benefiting from this dynamic. It’s not as if rank-and-file Republican voters are necessarily enamored with the GOP establishment in Washington.

As Benen concludes, "The root question is whether the Republican establishment has the juice to persuade voters to follow its lead. I’m just not sure it does." We may be witnessing a GOP implosion to rival the final days of the Whig Party and the Know Nothing Party in the 1850's which gave rise to the Republican Party. A political realignment may very well be underway.

As for tonight's debate, both Willard "Mittens" Romney and Ron Paul have been hammering Newt Gingrich in television ads and through surrogate attack dogs drawn from politicians and the media, and independent PACs. They will have to demonstrate that they have the cojones to take their fight directly to Newt Gingrich face-to-face and not back down tonight, or they will be dismissed as weak, cowardly blowhards as Tim Pawlenty "of Nuthin'" was earlier this year. They have two debates in December (the Donald Trump GOP Clown Car debate may be cancelled) to make their case before the Iowa Caucus. It is make or break time for the GOP establishment.