November 15, 2012--Stupid Party

Bobby Jindal finally got something right. The Louisiana governor went further than many of his Republican colleagues when he offered this post-election post mortem to POLITICO:

We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys. 

It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that. It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.

He, of course, like Senator Marco Rubio (who is already heading to Iowa) is already running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and so some or all of this may be his attempt to rebrand himself. 

Recall that he was an early contender this last time around but shot himself severely in the foot while giving a pathetic GOP response to President Obama's first State of the Union address. He came off looking like the proverbial deer in the headlights and that was the end of his candidacy.


But with Republicans suddenly interested in appealing to people of color, his South Asian background and brown skin are causing party leaders to take another look at him. Don't be surprised, then, to find him soon joining Cuban-American Rubio in Des Moines.

Nonetheless, his new message about the need for Republicans to become smart populists and to get out from under the perception that being a Republican is the same thing as being stupid makes sense for him, Republicans, and the rest of us.

This overnight political conversion by Jindal and some of the few remaining moderate Republicans may be the result of a cynical perception that unless they shrug off longstanding policies that alienated women, voters of color, and the young there is little chance that any Republican will have a chance to recapture the White House for the foreseeable future; or it may be that with the results from last week they no longer have to be cowed by the up-to-now real masters of the Republican Party—Rush Limbaugh (and his rightwing talk show ilk), Karl Rove (George W. Bush’s “brain” and uber-fundraiser); and Grover Norquist (president of Americans for Tax Reform).

After last Tuesday Limbaugh was left to sputter his delusional and bigoted inanities to a shrinking audience of rapidly aging white people; and Karl Rove was seen to melt down on live TV, on Fox News on election night, when he refused to accept his employer’s projection that Obama would win the Ohio vote and thus the election.

And then less than a week later, on “CBS This Morning,” on Norquist, often referred to as the 101^st senator because of his power and influence and who for decades has been able to extract no-new-taxes pledges from virtually every Republican member of Congress, saw his empire imploding around him.

Whereas before the election he had signed up 238 of the 242 Republicans in the House, by the time the votes were counted “only” about 215 remained; and of “his” 41 senators, after the dust settled, “only” 39 were still standing.

Clever is one thing he is and thus more than anything he knows how to count; and so sensing that this might be the beginning of the end for him, when asked what happened, why the GOP did so poorly, Norquist sputtered, because Mitt Romney is a “poopy head.”

Rona, who can spot cant and hypocrisy as well as anyone, and is as skeptical as they come, thinks that what we are witnessing with Bobby Jindal and Steve Schmidt and David Frum among others may actually be genuine—of course a genuine expression of their ambition (they want to be able to come back in from the political cold) and a sense of relief that they no longer need to cower before the likes of Rush Limbaugh; do not need to stand in line with hands out when genuflecting before Karl Rove and seeking his super-PAC money; and are free from being led around by someone whose best interpretation of reality is to call his party’s leader a poopy head.

“If you managed to get elected to the Senate,” Rona suggested, “and are now a member of that exclusive club, I assume you have quite an ego and like to think of yourself as independent, so how good does it feel to fear that you have to kowtow to people like them?”

“Not very good,” I said.

“And, of course,” she added, “if you want to be reelected and you sense that the tide is turning . . .”

She didn’t need to complete her thought.