All Partied Out
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele seems to be steering a rudderless ship.
No one seems to like him very much and he just lost his chief of staff.
Top fundraisers are breaking ties with the RNC and citing Steele as a major reason. While former high ranking Republican party officials have started a breakaway organization.
Reasonable people are returning to that late-2008 idea that the Republican Party is in disarray. The economic journalist, David Warsh surveying British assessments of US politics writes:
My hunch is that, at least in America, the Right is headed for a spectacular breakdown, only after which the once familiar strain of moderate Republican leadership will reappear.
Conservative pundits have been alienated by the party like Andrew Sullivan or disowned like David Frum. The rank-and-file don’t seem to be content either. Perhaps most famously of all, the Tea Party Movement seems to be sucking-up a lot of energy and attention from grass roots conservatism. Some Republican politicians (e.g., Jim DeMint) seem more than happy to nurture this potential party separatism.
That’s a lot of different groups, different types of conservatives, different types of actors with only occasionally over-lapping goals that aren’t getting along so well anymore. The coherence of the so-called extended party is taking a beating.
And yet the GOP is probably going to pick-up 20-30 House seats in the 2010 Midterms.
UPDATED: Jonathan Bernstein suggests the GOP disfunction doesn’t matter because “the formal party organizations just aren’t very important….” I’m not sure I agree, but certainly distractions can’t help coordination.
