The vetting process failed. Blaming it on staffers as Sessions and others in the RCCC have tried to do just points to a management problems. This is not a decision that should have been delegated to staffers. The problem isn’t the staffer, it is the person who delegated this to the staffer.
A very good and sobering analysis. In fact it is beyond sobering, the implications of this fiasco are frightening for the future of the party and, by extension, of the country.
I am as skeptical as you seem to be of the story put out by Sessions and the RCCC. You are right, this decision never should've been made at the staffing level of the RCCC and I do not believe that it was. Having read some blogs on this issue there is a story that the 11 New York County Republican Chairman met in a pizzeria (what is it about rinos meeting in pizzerias isn't that the way the aborted reform movement of the Republican Party got non-started?) And concluded that Dede Scozzafava, a rather obscure assemblywoman, a pro-abortionist, whose husband was a union organizer and who herself had been several times endorsed by Acorn was to be the nominee. The story has been put out the she was chosen because it was believed she could self fund the campaign without relying on the Republican party of New York. (We now have the worst of all worlds: the RCCC has invested six figures and the nominee's campaign is a pathetic, disorganized mess and otherwise financially and morally broke)
Somehow this bizarre decision was endorsed by Sessions and the RCCC. As you point out, that endorsement, whether made by staffers or by Sessions himself, was inexcusable and the responsibility is clearly Session' s. If in fact it was made by staffers it betrays a gross dereliction of duty. If it was made by Sessions himself, it betrays a fatal misunderstanding of the political landscape of 2009. In any event, as you point out, the decision to double down makes the decision fully the responsibility of the Republican elites in Washington. Newt Gingrich's action which, in effect, is to triple down on the mistake is absolutely mindless.
Now to get to the significance of all of this. The conservative candidate spokesman is perfectly right when he says this is the potentially the beginning of a civil war in the Republican Party. The article notes the growing influence of the Tea Party movement on the Republican Party. It is very significant that the conservative candidate, Hoffman, has been endorsed by elements of the Tea Party movement.
If the Republican Party fails to absorb the Tea Party movement the Republican Party will lose the forthcoming elections. To the extent that the Tea Party movement fails to reform the Republican Party, it will succeed only in electing Democrats.
The peculiar architecture of the American federal political system with its checks and balances means that it functions properly as a two-party system. Any successful attempt to form a third political party invariably condemns the political party from which it shoots off and to which it is most closely ideologically aligned to oblivion. Since it is human nature to entertain incessant arguments over the proper application of political power, political parties in America have developed a survival mechanism, they co-opt the principle grievances of the splinter group and make the dissidents' platform their own. This has been the history of political parties in America since the beginning. When a new ideology becomes popular, one party or the other seeks to absorb it.
If the party misjudges the public mood and embraces a splinter ideology in an effort to co-opt when that ideology is too radical to be palatable to the general public, the party loses the next election because it moves out of the mainstream. If the party misjudges the other way and declines to co-opt a movement which happens to be of sufficient strength, the party loses the next election because it has fractured its base. If a party attempts to absorb views of the other party, or approaching that of the other party, it risks losing the next election by alienating its own base. If it fails to absorb views approaching the ideology of the other party, it risks losing the next election by isolating itself to its own base.
Political parties are eternally faced with the same dilemma: should the party dilute its core message to attract less ideologically motivated voters or should it confine itself to a pure message and energize its core constituents? In attempting to solve these tensions, political parties are like amoebas or yeasts, everlastingly dividing or growing.
These realities which have been laid out above are regarded to be descriptive not necessarily desirable. The first reality is that America functions with a two-party system. Any deviation from that dialectic means that the system is wrecked and the dissidents almost always engage in self-defeating behavior which brings governance to the other end of the political system and accomplishes precisely the opposite of what they intend. This is of course not always the case as when the nation is confronted with a tectonic issue such as slavery. But it was the case for example with many other movements in America. Strong movements are absorbed by one or the other of the political parties and unpopular dissident movements simply die off.
The question is how does the conservative movement seize the Republican Party and exploit that vehicle to bring conservative governance to the country and save the republic from Obama? Despite what I wrote above concerning the eternal give-and-take between absorption and rejection of splinter movements by a political party, I nevertheless believe that a political party, especially one that enjoys ideological agreement by a 60+ percent of the country, wins elections by the purity of its message. Anyone who can find an inconsistency between the prior post and the following post can make the most of it.
This is an existential moment for the Republican Party. If the RCCC misjudges the mood of the country and antagonizes the tea party movement it will go on the wrong direction, in my judgment. Sessions shows every indication that he has not got a clue.
The article recites the perennial liberal argument to conservatives that in order for conservatives to win, the Republican Party must move to the left and attempt to co-opt the middle. Liberals will often cite their own success in the 2008 elections in which they used this strategy by moving to the right and winning Blue Dog seats. This is misleading. It is misleading because there are two elections in this country. One is conducted by the left in which the Democrats try to convince the majority philosophy, which is conservative, that the Democratic Party is really further to the right than it truthfully is. To do this it enlists the media to paint a distorted picture of the landscape. The electorate is told that it is the Republicans and conservatives who are out of sorts and out of step with the mainstream, that they are radically right when in fact the great majority of the country is conservative.
Both Rasmussen and Gallup have remarked on the anomaly in America in which the plurality party is the Democrat party but the majority philosophy is the conservative philosophy. Gallup states flatly that electoral success comes to the Democrat party when it convinces independents that Democrats are conservative. The election for Republicans then is to mobilize not its party base but it's the philosophical base. The philosophical base of the Republican Party today has two legs, traditional conservatism and the Tea Party movement. When the Republican Party mobilizes its philosophical base, it wins elections.
Laid upon this template, the fiasco of the RCCC in the 23rd Congressional District in New York State for this upcoming special election takes on ominous significance. If the 23rd District becomes the model of elite Republican behavior, the party is absolutely doomed. The RCCC has left us in a position in which nothing good can happen. If the Rino wins, the RCCC will be confirmed in its wrongheadedness. If Hoffman the conservative wins, many in the Tea Party movement will be confirmed in their belief that they need have no truck with the Republican Party. If the Democrat wins, we lose one more seat and we are all further demoralized and embittered one against the other.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The failure of the Republican Party in the next two elections can well mean the failure of the American Republic as people my age have come to understand it because if Obama is not stopped it means the end of our constitutional republic.
There is no going it without the Republican Party. Every principled conservative and every patriotic Tea Party member who wants to save the Republic has got to work within the framework of the Republican Party. If Pete Sessions persists in this obduracy, he must go and he must go quick. There can be no compromise. Either the Republican Party accommodates itself to the tea party movement and the tea party movement realizes it's electoral limitations without the Republican Party, or Obama and his henchmen will become further entrenched in power. There is no other way. The history of American political parties demonstrates indisputably that Third-party excursions are only the way of folly.
Work for reform of the Republican Party!
