In a discussion on Politico entitled, "Has the RNC Become a Joke?,"Christine Pelosi (daughter of the Speaker of the House) points out the political risks that tea party activism poses for Republican election prospects.
In politics it's better to be lucky than good - Barack Obama is both. The President's career is a study in good policy and good fortune. This whole RNC sex club visit is deja vu all over again. In 2004, Illinois Republican Jack Ryan's US Senate lead over Barack Obama imploded after revelations that Ryan had dragged his former wife to sex club visits. Ryan dropped out, Obama criused to victory, and the national stage was set for Americas 44th President. In 2010, President Obama takes his landmark healthcare and education reform laws into traditionally majority-reducing midterms; but, Republicans could once again swipe defeat from the jaws of victory. With the RNC's money pratfalls, tea party candidates poised to become Ralph Naders of the right and elect Democrats as in NY-23, and no GOP jobs plan except impeaching the President out of his, Barack Obama may yet again profit from his opponents' mistakes. The RNC needs to tamp down spending, discourage tea party Naderites, take impeachment off the table, and offer a credible jobs plan. Will they? Stay tuned .... and stay out of the clubs.
We can only hope that the Tea Party folks decide that third party candidacies are their 'bag,' or that in the cases where they usurp Republican nominations from the corporate-sponsored 'mainstream' candidates, hope that their extremist, confrontational, and often racist language disgusts enough potential Republican voters that the Democratic candidates can win even in formerly 'safe Republican' districts. We saw this happen in upstate New York last fall, when Democrat Bill Owens managed to win in a district where a Republican last lost in the 1800's. In either case we may see the Republicans have problems.
Having extremist candidates in opposition to the Democrat makes the need even greater to keep up a united front against them. We can't have minor-party candidates taking even a tenth of a percentage point away from the Democrat, as that may constitute the potential margin of victory in some of these races. We on the left side of the political spectrum must not allow the 'Nader effect' to happen to us this time around.
We should also bear in mind the historical precedent of Hitler's Nazi party coming to power through the splitting of opposition; he never got a majority yet was able to control the parliamentary body through legal means prior to usurping all power through extra-legal methods.
It is possible to embrace the positions of folks like Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, the late Howard Zinn, and the like, while still voting for Democratic candidates in November. We are now at a crucial time in our nation's political history, and how progressives respond may well be the key. Long term demographics are on our side. We have been seeing, and will continue to see, an increasing (and eventually a majority) percentage of our population consist of non-Caucasians. We must not allow Republicans the opportunity to gerrymander away our demographic gains, and to do that we must control as many statehouses as we can this cycle; the Census results will lead to many states needing to redistrict, and Democraticallly-controlled statehouses will enable the creation of truly fair district boundaries.
Texas, in particular, is critical as it will be getting about 4 new congressional districts after the census results, so it would be a massive win for progressivism if Bill White were to gain the governorship. If the converse happens, we could lose most of those seats through gerrymandering, and we saw how small our real working majority is for even moderately positive legislation when the House could only barely pass what would have previously been considered Republican-style health care reform.
I am not saying that we should embrace every policy or piece of legislation that gets proposed by President Obama or that gets enacted by this Congress. For example, I would like a single payer system for its simplicity and economic efficiency; I would have liked to have seen Robert Reich instead of Summers and Geithner designing economic policy; and I have very serious misgivings about the current ideas around off-shore drilling. However, as Benjamin Franklin said while partipating in the formulation of opposition to the vested interests of his day (namely, the British),
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Nor can we repeat the mistakes of the progressive opposition to the Roman Empire (according to Monty Python):
So, donate what you can, work your tushy off, and vote [early and often lol] for your Democratic candidates this year!