Conservative Split with the Tea Party
Conservative Split with the Tea Party
Nicolaus Mills: Conservative Split with the Tea Party
In recent weeks nobody has been more critical of the Tea Party?s favorite new politician, Rand Paul, the Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky, than New York Times conservative op-ed columnist, Ross Douthat.
In his May 24 column, ?The Principles of Rand Paul,? Douthat delivered a blistering attack on Paul for his failure on the Rachel Maddow Show to say unequivocally that he supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Douthat found Paul?s tap-dancing on whether he would or would not have voted for the bill in 1964 ?offensive, tone deaf, and politically crazy,? adding, ?It was also sadly typical of the political persuasion that Rand Paul represents.?
Douthat?s disgust was understandable. Paul?s position evoked the memory of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and took Republicans to their disastrous presidential-election defeat in 1964. As far as Douthat was concerned, Paul had learned nothing from William Buckley Jr., the founder of the conservative National Review and an outspoken opponent of civil rights legislation during the sixties. ?I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow,? Buckley acknowledged in 2004. ?I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.?
The split between thoughtful conservatives who think like Ross Douthat and the Rand Paul-Sarah Palin Tea Party supporters is not, however, doing Democrats and the Left as much good as it should. For uniting virtually all conservatives and most Republicans is the idea that whether it comes to regulation or improving the economy, there is little good the federal government can do.
It will take a concerted effort on the part of the Obama administration to persuade middle-of-the-road voters that is not the case, and so far the president has failed to do so, as his approval rating, down to 42 percent in the daily Rasmussen polls, show. Right now the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is on its way to becoming Obama?s version of the Iranian hostage crisis, which brought the Jimmy Carter administration to an end.
It is not that, like Carter, the president has done anything wrong. It is simply that he has done nothing well. The president came to the crisis late, initially treating it as a distraction, and in recent days he has acted more like a spectator than a man in charge. The proposal, recently floated by former Clinton secretary of labor, Robert Reich, that Obama put British Petroleum under temporary receivership so that the country can be confident BP is doing all it can to stop the oil spill it is responsible for, does not even seem to be on the administration?s radar.
Worse still, the president has not capitalized as much as he should on the great achievement of his administration, the passage of health care reform. It is hard for voters to know exactly what difference health reform will make in their personal lives, and the administration appears to be in no rush to tell them. It is as if they were trapped by their own wonkishness. The outstanding exception in this regard is Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. She has entered the battle currently going on between companies that are waiting until the last moment (between September 23 and January 1, 2011) before complying with the requirement that they put all their employees? children under twenty-five on family health plans and companies that are looking to provide expanded coverage as soon as possible.
Don?t wait, Sebelius has declared. ?This is likely to be an overwhelmingly healthy group of individuals so the extra costs should be minimal.? Hers is sound advice, and with five months to go before the November midterm elections, the Obama administration has time to follow her example by reaching out to voters in a variety of areas without worrying that the Tea Party conservatives will surprise anyone with better proposals. The latter are not, after all, out to get Washington to take on bank regulation, put forward a second stimulus, or improve inner-city public schools.
The good news for Obama and Democrats is that, in the final analysis, Tea Party conservatism stands for a negative agenda. Save for guarding the border with Mexico more effectively, they essentially want the federal government to sit on its hands. They are hoping enough voters will believe we can fix the problems that beset us as a nation only by going our individual ways.
