"TO SOME DEGREE"

'...some of this Tea Party anger is racist & having a non-black person on the [2016] ticket will diffuse it to some degree.' Cokie Roberts

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) September 25, 2013

Sorry, I don't buy this at all, and if there's any reduction in the rage, it's going to be about as meaningful as the reduction in wind speed that took Katrina down to a Category 3 before it made landfall.

Are you watching what's going in D.C. right now? The anger of the crazy base is so extreme that its next likely victims will be any Republican who votes the wrong way -- as defined Ted Cruz -- on the upcoming Obamacare procedural votes. The anger has just taken on a life of its own. This is like a nonviolent riot. Here's Erick Erickson in high dudgeon:

... Meanwhile, John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander and other Republican Senators are leaking attacks against Cruz on background. They complained to reporters about Cruz suggesting they were cowards. They did so off the record and in the shadows.

Mitch McConnell, instead of standing with Cruz on the floor of the Senate, participated in a teletownhall in which he told listeners the only way to stop Obamacare was for him to be Senate Majority Leader. [update: this information came after the initial post]

Ted Cruz and Mike Lee will not get the forty-one votes they need to sustain their filibuster. They will be betrayed by Republican senators who are willing to fund Obamacare while claiming to vote against it. But in this filibuster and in their brilliant strategy, they have exposed Republicans who will not fight. They have exposed Republicans who are so desperate for their own reelection they will say or do anything when they could not bother in off years. They have shown Republicans that there are Republicans who are willing to stand up to Barack Obama and to the cowards within their own party.

... Because Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and their House counterparts have shown just how far conservatives are willing to go now, House and Senate Republicans know they cannot cave for table scraps....

Cornyn, McConnell, and Alexander are not black, needless to say. Erickson also attacks "Beltway Republican pundits bellyaching over Cruz and Lee fighting the fight others promised to fight." Those pundits aren't black. Karl Rove, now loathed by the crazy base, isn't black.

Don't get me wrong. When I say that it doesn't matter who's on the ballot for the Democrats in 2016, I'm not denying that Republican rage has a significant racial component. But you have to remember that racists in the base will always be racially angry at Democrats because so many non-whites are Democratic voters. (The GOP base hates that about Democrats, while also envying the party's ability to win over non-whites. Members of the base usually resolve that contradiction by concluding that non-whites are too stupid to vote GOP. Odd, isn't it, that non-white voters reject a party that treats them with such contempt.)

Republican voters associate non-whites with Democrat-driven dependency on government (which they rail against, sometimes from Medicare scooters). That won't change, even if Democrats run a low-melatonin low-melanin Clinton-O'Malley ticket in 2016.

Now, I happen to believe that Republicans hate all "others," regardless of race -- not just non-whites but gay people and the long-term unemployed and women with unplanned pregnancies and anyone who doesn't profess a Judeo-Christian faith -- but racism is the template for that contempt. But unless America suddenly runs out of "others" sometime in 2016, the GOP and its voters will be just as crazy then as they are now.