I love the lede of this Politico story:
Wall Street donors and bundlers plunged hundreds of millions of dollars into the GOP's effort to take back the White House and Senate this year -- and now some are threatening to cut off the spigot ahead of 2014 in the face of disappointing results.You can understand their disappointment regarding the tax hikes on the rich (hey, isn't this the kind of legislation we pay you guys to block?), but, um, the rest of it? That's a surprise?
New York donors have a list of complaints: Republicans focused too much on social issues, backed too many weak candidates, stalled Hurricane Sandy aid and even let taxes go up for the very rich -- in other words, the very people giving the money and their friends....
Apparently so:
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) ... said donors ... want to hear directly from top senators about the lessons learned from the disappointing 2012 cycle -- when Wall Street donors cringed alongside other Republicans as not one, but two GOP Senate candidates made controversial comments about rape....The GOP donor base includes guys like hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who made a seven-figure contribution to a pro-Romney super PAC -- and has made donations in the millions to support marriage equality. (Singer's son is married to a man.) And they somehow never imagined that what they've been doing has been at cross-purposes, until just now.
One fundraiser said multiple companies and executives said not to come up to New York until after Sandy relief was passed....
Donors, too, have been perplexed at the focus of some Senate GOP candidates on social issues.
"There is a vein throughout the Republican Party of people who are very socially liberal. You don't live in New York City, which exalts in its diversity, in all these things that happen here if you have a problem," said one veteran Republican New York fundraiser of the frustration with the party's stance on social issues. "Everybody who lives here -- everyone has lots of gay friends, friends of color, Muslims, that’s the world you live in. It's not exotic. It's part of the fabric of life."
I guess they believed that all the abortion-bashing and gay-bashing and bashing of the values and mores of coastal urban America was just boob-bait for the Bubbas -- the party didn't mean any of that. Well, surprise -- the party did mean all of that. The Bubbas vote in primaries. You can't win a GOP nomination without mollifying the Bubbas. Right-wing media moguls, who may personally share the Wall Streeters' ideas on social issues, keep fanning these flames. And that's turned the GOP into what it is today.
5 comments:
Well said. I have nothing to add, except that the "veteran Republican New York fundraiser" ought to know better than to use "exalts" when he means exults.
And don't forget the Bubbette's. They're a part of the problem, too.
Though, I have a sneaking suspicion that more than just a few of them voted for the "D's" last year, when their husband, Bubba, wasn't looking - and acted appropriately surprised when Mittens and Paulie and their Republican Senate and House candidates didn't win.
"Why, I DOOOOO declare... I don't know HOW such a thing could have happened. EVERYone I know voted for them!"
A strategy guaranteed to fail: give up everything but the naked and relentless class war.
Watch their white working class support shrivel before their eyes.
This is the opposite of the only strategy that might work for the GOP: give up the class war and return to the Republicanism of IKE, Nixon, and Rockefeller.
Throughout my lifetime, non-rich whites have cheered every time the rich attacked the non-rich, because the whites were fooled into seeing the attacks as attacks on "them" -- non-whites, immigrants, "union thugs," etc., etc. Not sure when whites will wise up, if ever.
Like my Granddaddy use to say at a time like this.
" yer can't trust some hounds, they're jest plum crazy an' likely to bite thu hand that feed em. time fer serius talkin'...Pass me muh gern Boy,
Another use modern day use for firearm Hmmm? ;-)
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