Headwinds for the Republicans

The Republican party is looking increasingly desperate as its faithful attempt to deny the nomination to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney

The last months of 2011 have seen a series of setbacks for conservative Republicans.  On November 21, the congressional “supercommittee” admitted its failure.  Last summer, Republicans held America’s credit ratings hostage, and raised the debt ceiling for the federal government only on condition that the committee, made up of members of both parties in Congress, be created and charged with cutting $1.2 trillion from the federal budget in the next decade.  If the committee failed, deep cuts were to go into effect automatically following the presidential election, in 2013.

The supercommittee failed to come to a consensus, however, because of Republican opposition to raising tax rates on the rich (as distinct from closing loopholes and lowering rates).  Following the announcement of the supercommittee’s failure, President Obama announced that he would veto any attempt to reduce the size of the cuts that must be enacted, in the absence of a coherent plan.  Obama and the Democrats are in a stronger position than the Republicans.  Under the law passed last summer Social Security will be protected from cuts, so that most of the automatic sequestration, if it comes about, will take place at the expense of defense spending, which Republicans have specialised in protecting (the southern and western states that are now the Republican base are heavily dependent on military spending).

It is questionable, however, whether any of these cuts will ever take place.  Congress can amend or rescind the sequestration law at any time, and if the Republicans recapture the Senate while holding the House in 2012, an all-Republican Congress is likely to try to do so.  By threatening a veto, Obama is foreshadowing the defensive strategy he would be forced to use if he faced an opposition Congress, as Bill Clinton did following the mid-term elections of 1994.  

The right has suffered setbacks on other fronts as well.  The Occupy Wall Street movement is wearing out its welcome in a number of cities, including liberal cities like New York, Portland and Oakland, where city governments have sought to evict protestors who turned into permanent campers.  But the movement has already changed politics by upstaging the Tea Party movement, a mobilisation of the far-right base which the mainstream media persisted in treating as a genuine populist uprising.

Even worse for the Republicans has been the performance of their presidential candidates in televised primary debates.  Conservatives have rallied behind first one and then another marginal candidate, in an attempt to deny the nomination to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, whom they view as a moderate and an opportunist.  But each of their would-be tribunes has lost favour quickly.  

Texas governor Rick Perry alienated conservatives when he accused them of lack of compassion toward illegal immigrants, and he may have doomed his campaign when, claiming he would abolish three agencies on becoming president, he was unable to recall the third.  Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, was briefly the right’s favorite, until allegations of sexual harassment incidents from his past made the news, at which point Newt Gingrich shot to the head of the pack.  The fact that conservative Republicans would rally, if only temporarily, behind the bloviating Gingrich, a thrice-married former speaker of the House and a former lobbyist, is a sign of desperation.  Gingrich used his new status as the conservative alternative to Romney to denounce child labour laws and call for school janitors to be fired and replaced by poor school-children.  To persuade American voters next fall to fire Barack Obama, the Republicans will have to do better.

A contribution to State of the Left, a monthly insight report from Policy Network's Social Democracy Observatory

Michael Lind is policy director of the New America Foundation’s Economic Growth Program and a columnist at Salon