Yes, yes....most of the attention paid to U.S. Senator John Cornyn this week has been about his disaster of a week on L'Affaire Sotomayor. But something else happened last week, and it may well have a lasting impact on Election 2010.
There was already a bit of a fire developing between "establishment" Republicans and their right flank. You might have missed it, but John Cornyn tried to douse that fire this week.
With gasoline.
It was a two-day trainwreck for Cornyn. It began on Thursday, when the senator, who is also the head of the NRSC, the campaign arm for Senate Republicans, declared that it would be premature for the NRSC to endorse Patrick Toomey's candidacy in Pennsylvania.
His rationale? The field was not yet set. People were still looking at the race.
That does not, however, quite explain this:
"[Charlie] Crist is a dedicated public servant and a dynamic leader, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee will provide our full support to ensure that he is elected the next United States Senator from Florida."
This, from an NRSC press release endorsing Florida governor Charlie Crist's campaign for the United States Senate. This endorsement came just two weeks before Cornyn demurred from endorsing Toomey.
Needless to say, the field is not yet set in Florida, either. And not only are there presumably candidates looking at the race, there is one that is already IN the race. To the unending consternation of conservatives in the GOP, the endorsed candidate is ideologically to the left of the unendorsed candidate in Florida.
As anyone in the corps of movement Republicans would be very quick to tell you, Patrick Toomey is one of their idols. Charlie Crist, to their way of thinking, is a RINO who took Obama's stimulus money, which is betrayal of the highest order to the American right.
If the past five years of the public conversation about politics has taught us anything, it is that the far-right ideologues in this country have no problem working up a good victimhood complex. Hell, one of them wrote a book a few years back about how Christians (over 80% of the population of North America) are OPPRESSED in the United States by its government, the representatives of which are over 90% Christian.
Watching the NRSC endorse a Republican in a potentially competitive primary, and then watching them balk at endorsing a hard-right Republican in what is, to date, an uncompetitive primary, is bound to put the right flank of the GOP on tilt.
Of course, John Cornyn and his team at the NRSC (as well as the NRCC over on the House side) have a dilemma. The Republican Party brand has been circling the drain as of late. For most of the past decade, the GOP playbook has been to appeal to the base, turn them out, and just hope to hang onto enough other voters to get to 50.1%. Now, the base simply is not large enough to sustain that kind of strategy. The last two elections have proven that fairly conclusively. Compounding the damage for the GOP is the fact that it does not appear as if the erosion of their brand has bottomed out yet.
So, Cornyn clearly thinks that he has to go beyond the base in order to win. Hence, the endorsement of Crist juxtaposed with the lukewarm shoulder towards Toomey. The problem with that strategy is that a lot of the money, and an overwhelming proportion of the energy, in the Republican Party is in that base. Any flagging in their enthusiasm is going to have immediate repercussions for the party.
This is the Catch-22 that the GOP finds itself in right now. The challenge for Cornyn and all of his mates is to figure out how to broaden the decidedly narrow appeal of their party right now (to that end, check out this report today by Gallup), without offending a cadre of voters who, it must be said, are pretty easy to offend.
So far, though, Cornyn is stumbling in this challenge. On Friday, according to TPMDC, Cornyn pulled off the second act in his two-act play to kill off the GOP's prospects in the Senate.
One day after he put the brakes on an imminent NRSC endorsement of Pat Toomey, he went on to a conservative blog to explain his team's decision to endorse Charlie Crist.
How well do you think that THIS was received???
Some believe that we should be a monolithic Party; I disagree. While we all might wish for a Party comprised only of people who agree with us 100 percent of the time, this is a pipedream.
Let's just say that this missive was received...um...brusquely. But you can't blame Cornyn for trying. He has one of the least enviable tasks in Election 2010. How well he manages that task will go a long way toward determining the balance of power in the U.S. Senate after next year's elections.