GOP’s post-Obama problem: Why they’re lost without him — and with the electorate he helped create

[DonViejo]

GOP’s post-Obama problem: Why they’re lost without him — and with the electorate he helped create

The establishment vanquished the Tea Party by drinking its poison — but has no plan for life after this president

JOAN WALSH

With the 2014 congressional primary season almost behind us, the conventional wisdom has hardened: The Republican establishment has vanquished its Tea Party tormentors. The progressive response to that narrative — that the establishment only “won” by capitulating to the Tea Party — is hardening, too. I want to challenge that a little.

When North Carolina State Sen. Thom Tillis won the GOP Senate nomination in early May, it seemed ridiculous to claim the Tea Party had been defeated, though he technically had a Tea Party rival: Tillis was as extreme as his opponent, supporting personhood legislation and tax cuts for the wealthy, opposing immigration reform and boasting that he’d personally stopped the state’s Medicaid expansion. I argued at the time that the story was not the Tea Party’s defeat, but its victory: the extent to which it had taken over the Republican establishment.

That didn’t seem true in the wake of Tuesday night’s election results, particularly in Kentucky. Credit where it’s due: Mitch McConnell crushed Matt Bevin. Sure, he did it by courting his Tea Party junior Sen. Rand Paul and by sliming and outspending Bevin. And sure, he won by a smaller margin than any incumbent GOP senator who’d faced a primary in the last 80 years.

But he won, even after making a deal with Harry Reid to reopen the government that was supposed to be his undoing. So did Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a Boehner ally with a Tea Party rival, while in Georgia, the three candidates tied to the Tea Party lost, to two more polished and mainstream conservatives, Rep. Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue, who face a July run-off. And looking ahead, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Kansas’s Pat Roberts and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander look likely to beat back Tea Party challengers. In 2010, when even conservative incumbents like Utah’s Bob Bennett and South Carolina’s Bob Inglis lost their seats in Congress, all of those races likely would have turned out differently.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/26/what_happens_to_the_gop_after_obama/

[Arkana]

1. They killed the Tea Party rattlesnake, but not before they got bit five or six times.

The poison is in their veins now.

[Cosmocat]

2. Nonsense

they GOP will be just fine.

They will do what they do, scramble around until the find SOMETHING that our populace will buy into.

Hill probably wins the presidency, if we are lucky, but given their Gerryrigging in congress she likely will face the same ridiculous we don't have the white house so we will take our ball and go home bullshit this President has dealt with for four years now, while maintaining majorities in most state legislatures and governorships.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. Been hearing about the GOP's demise for YEARS. Sadly, they're as strong as ever!

[Proud Liberal Dem]

4. Unfortunately

I sense that they will shift gears from "fun with racism" to "fun with misogyny" (which has really already started to some extent). In fact I'm counting on it.