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  • The GOP in the Age of ObamaWill the Tea Party and Republican Establishment Unite or Fight?
  • Gary Gerstle (bio)

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Boston Tea Party image: courtesy of Archiving Early America Obama cartoon: used with the permission of Matt Wuerker and the Cartoonist Group (License 2010–205)

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A dispirited lot of Republican senators gathered at the Library of Congress in early January 2009 to size up their situation as a confident and purposive President-elect Barack Obama prepared to assume office. These Republicans had reason to be in a dark mood, having seen their party suffer, in November 2008, one of its worst electoral defeats in modern American history.1

Obama had won a larger percentage of the popular vote (almost 53 percent) than any Democratic candidate for the presidency in more than fifty years. The Democrats had gained twenty-one seats in the House to give them a sizable majority (257 to 178), and their fifty-seven seats in the Senate had put them within reach of that all-important, filibuster-proof supermajority of sixty (a status they would gain in early 2009). Political opportunity had not looked this good for the Democrats—and this bad for the Republicans—since Lyndon Baines Johnson's 1964 landslide victory against Barry Goldwater.

The Republicans seemingly had little going for them. Their president and party had presided over one of the worst financial crashes in American history. Even before the crash, George W. Bush had become a reviled figure as Americans began to view W.'s war of choice in Iraq as a form of adventurism for which America was paying too steep a price. Americans began questioning, too, the core Republican approach to the economy—a commitment to freeing capitalist markets from government "meddling"—as it became apparent that this was what had given Wall Street the license to behave like a Las Vegas casino. [End Page 23] For all these reasons, independent voters had abandoned the Republican Party in droves, rendering it a small, and besieged, institution.

It is hard now to recall that early 2009 moment of Democratic hope and Republican dejection. The first two years of the Obama presidency have gone worse for the Democrats and better for the Republicans than most had imagined they would. A large part of the Obama administration's failure to deliver on its early promise was due to the damage that the financial crash caused the economy, and to the sheer difficulty of figuring out ways to repair it. Had the Democrats been able to reduce unemployment to 6 or 7 percent, they would be heading into the November 2010 elections with a great deal of confidence and expectation.

But two other factors contributed to Democratic stumbling: first, the ability of Republicans in Congress, and especially in the Senate, to deploy a clever strategy of delay and obstruction against Democratic initiatives; and second, conservatives' success in capturing the populist insurgency that began to rumble across the land in 2009. The key Republican was minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a lifer in the Senate and a wily master of its complex rules and moods. While he paid lip service to bipartisanship, McConnell was, in fact, determined to saddle the Democrats with legislative defeats—and thus show the country that they were unable or unfit to govern. The populist insurgency has no single figure like McConnell; to the contrary, part of its character is that it obeys no single master or commander. But in its various manifestations—the Tea Party, the town hall meetings about health care, the Tenthers and the Birthers, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Ron and Rand Paul—this insurgency has rocked American politics and thrown all kinds of obstacles in the Democrats' path. Both the McConnell-led Senate Republicans and the various groups of right-wing populists have legitimated their opposition in terms of being true to the first principles of conservatism: small government, low taxes, and fiscal solvency. How well the Republican Party establishment and the populist insurgency can get along, and whether their joint embrace of conservative orthodoxy will succeed in returning the GOP to power, is not yet...

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