Don't look now, but the national Republican Party is on the verge of becoming the California Republican Party. And that ain't a good thing -- unless you're a Democrat.
Looking at the debacle of the just concluded Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami, the national Republican Party looks more and more like the California Republican Party, which has moved so far to the right that it can't win a major statewide election unless it's running an Austrian-born action movie star and would have no relevance whatsoever absent California's strange two-thirds legislative vote requirement on budgetary matters, which it shares with only two other states.
And now, that party is mostly minus Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who can barely stand to talk with his fellow California party leaders at this point. One of whom, state Republican chairman Ron Nehring, a protege of notorious anti-government lobbyist and Jack Abramoff associate Grover Norquist -- and whose whole career, naturally if not ironically, is built around Washington -- seeks to become the next Republican national chairman.
Sarah Palin, not to put too fine a point on it, made a fool of herself yesterday in Miami. She stole the show yesterday at the Republican Governors Association's woe-is-us-Republicans session in Miami. Everyone, including an amazing 220 members of the press, was waiting on her every word. Yet... she essentially recycled her old stump speech. And her ballyhooed press conference? She took only four questions, delivering very vague answers, before getting the hook from Texas Governor Rick Perry.
As the national GOP moves to emulate the CRP, the right-wing California paradigm seems on the verge of passing from the scene of relevant politics. Thanks to Barack Obama's crushing 61% to 37% defeat of John McCain in the Golden State, much bigger than any landslide ever won by the sainted Ronald Reagan, who was actually far more pragmatic and worldly than his current would-be acolytes. And to the redistricting reform initiative championed by Schwarzenegger, which is designed to come up with at least a few more moderate members of the caucus through an end to legislative gerrymandering of legislative districts.
The current version of the California Republicans is insular, derived from the extremist Young Americans for Freedom, and much enamored of the nasty hyperpartisan Sarah Palin, who herself is now trying to be bipartisan -- not that anyone will buy that reinvention routine.
Palin dominated the Republican governors meeting, which can only count as an early Christmas for President-elect Obama. I'll say it right now. If Palin runs against Obama, it will be a major wipe-out in favor of the Democrats. Which is not what the right-wing base of the Republican Party imagines. Their imagination, frankly, runs to the extremely delusional, as last week's confab of far right leaders at Brent Bozell's home in Virginia came to the bizarre conclusion that the problem with the McCain campaign was that it was too liberal.
That points to their extreme level of crisis for Republicans in the wake of Obama's decisive election, which their captive echo chamber media in the talk radio and blogosphere realms all absolutely insisted would never happen. Those folks foolishly imagined that a tenuous relationship between Obama and long ago Weather Undergrounder-turned-respected Chicago professor Bill Ayers would mean more to voters than McCain's long record of supporting President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Wrong. Wrong. Very, very, wrong.
The California-style illusion of the far right faction now dominating the Republican Party continued today with former California Attorney General Dan Lungren, now Sacramento area Congressman Dan Lungren, making his campaign for the House minority leadership official today. He is challenging Ohio Congressman John Boehner. I ran into Boehner on the campaign trail. While he is assailed by right-wingers as insufficiently conservative, I can assure you that by any objective measure, he is quite conservative.
Lungren, even in his currently gerrymandered district, had some trouble getting re-elected, defeating Dr. Bill Durston, a Vietnam War vet, by a 50-44 margin.
Lungren is an amiable fellow, son of Richard Nixon's personal physician, who ran for governor of California in 1998 and was blown away by Gray Davis. The election was one of the biggest landslides in California history, with Davis crushing Lungren, 58-38.
I knew Lungren had a big problem when I recorded him saying: "Californians are even more conservative than they know."
If the national GOP moves further in the direction of the California GOP, here is what is likely to happen.
Permanent marginalization. The national GOP has already seen its red state coalition shattered, with Obama taking away nine red states from the Republican ticket while losing no blue states.
This has left the Republicans -- who carried no age group under the age of 65 -- pushed back into redoubts of the Deep South and the rural Plains states.
I've seen this movie before, here in California.
Through their narrow majority on the California Republican Party executive board -- at the motion of a far right ideologue and blogger named Jon Fleischman, the Southern California party vice chairman -- the party leadership voted to block any move to open the California Republican presidential primary to independent voters. This was a move to help Mitt Romney, the heavy favorite of the Orange County conservative money crowd who provide the financial underpinnings of Fleischman's Flash Report, and to block more moderate Republicans such as McCain and Rudy Giuliani.
But the move, ultimately, was a failure, as McCain swept virtually all of California's delegates despite the exclusion of independent voters. (Many of whom found another form of disenfranchisement in the Democratic primary, where many independent votes have still not been counted.)
Which left Schwarzenegger -- the constant target of attacks from the Fleischman/Spence/Mike Schroeder faction of far right Republicans -- and McCain and their joint operatives in the catbird's seat, again. This isn't surprising since my New West Notes readers know that even core Republican voters agree more with the Arnold view of politics than with the YAF view of politics. Not that it helped at all in the wake of the Obama wave.
Fleischman and far right California Republican Assembly leader Mike Spence's declarations last year in the NWN Forum section that the very existence of the minimum wage equates to socialism were an early presaging of the extremist, talk radio-style declarations that emanated from the Republican campaign this fall. As were the absurd assertions that then Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez is a Communist fellow traveler. All fringe stuff.
Ironically, Hugh Hewitt, the Southern California radio host, blogger and Mitt Romney's hagiographic biographer who no less played a key role in the right-wing blogosphere's failed campaign of character assassination against McCain as well as Obama, claimed that Sean Hannity's endorsement of Romney was far more important than Arnold Schwarzenegger's, in California as well as nationally. Jon Fleischman, the Southern California Republican party vice chairman who runs the far right Flash Report web site (key for state Republican conservatives though not a mass communicator), gratuitously penned this piece of advice for McCain, that he send Schwarzenegger to the East and avoid him in California. Fleischman, incidentally, backed by California state party chairman Ron Nehring, authored the resolution to block independents from voting in the California Republican primary.
Talk show host/blogger Hewitt claimed, absurdly, with regard to McCain and Romney: "If you had to chose, either guy would rather have Sean Hannity and his national reach" than Arnold Schwarzenegger. And Fleischman -- whose web site is the go-to spot for the California far right -- falsely claimed that Schwarzenegger is very unpopular with California Republicans and, unsolicited, advised McCain on his blog to have Schwarzenegger campaign for him in the East.
Meanwhile, in the real world, many undoubtedly don't know who Sean Hannity is. And in the real world, Hannity fawns on camera over Schwarzenegger.
You see where this is going. Further and further away from reality. Deeper into the alternate universe echo chamber of America's far right.