Bring On Those Unpopulist Republicans

Go for the gold, Obama!

As predictions of a GOP takeover of Congress abound -- most handicappers are now laying at least even money on the House, since it is the "people's," meaning an erratic abyss of populist whim and mobocratic anarchy -- the GOP itself seems oddly intent on playing its cards as populism denied.

The party is trapped in an inescapable bind: its demagoguery is being nakedly outstripped and betrayed by its core, authoritarian-corporate values; and Democrats, finally, are exploiting this -- the GOP's internal antithesis. With pressure maintained, they can split the vaporous Tea Party-GOP alliance, dooming ultraconservatism's November comeback.
This divorcing objective is, of course, key. As I mentioned yesterday, a recent Gallup poll indicates that a whopping 43 percent of swing-voting independents express support of the Tea Party movement, which is a horrifying margin of democratic error.

Yet the movement is shatterable. It is leaderless, already fractured, ill defined and immensely sophomoric; what's more, as a fresh populist surge of mostly economic intent -- as opposed to the older Christian right of social conservatism -- it couldn't be in bed with a more faithless lover.

This central contradiction is what the liberal faction among Senate Democrats understands. And it's trying its best to drag its conservative Democratic colleagues onto the road of epiphany, which is actually far less muddied than it seems.

Compromise and accommodate on financial reform? For heaven's sake why? Not to do so is not only good policy, it's great politics.

Let Republicans explain to all those Tea Party-warming independents why, for instance, an independent consumer protection agency is an insufferable inconvenience to their pocketbooks; let Republicans explain why unregulated derivatives couldn't possibly blow us up again; let Republicans explain why commercial bankers should be allowed to gamble Everyman's deposits on those previously defended, unregulated hedge funds; and -- my favorite -- let Republicans explain to usury-soaked consumers with a taste for tea why credit-card interest rates shouldn't be capped by law, as Sen. Bernie Sanders insists they should.

Politically speaking, the Tea Party-GOP alliance in broadest terms is better than just unholy. It is, as mentioned, antithetical to itself. Recently, in comments to reporters, DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen shrewdly noted, in CQ's rather inadequate paraphrasing, that "Republicans are dealing with a 'double-edged sword' with the conservative Tea Party movement, which he acknowledged is helping revive Republican grass-roots efforts but also wrenching the party further to the right."

In other, more comprehensible words, let the public face of the movement wrench away. Nothing could be more rewarding to the politically sober. By aligning themselves with Wall Street's Republican protectors on Capitol Hill, Tea Party activists -- that would be the idiots with those Joker posters you see on the evening news -- are merely wrenching and alienating the moderately intrigued, which is to say, the mother lode of that aforementioned 43 percent.

But, as also mentioned, Democrats can only effect the estrangement by keeping the pressure applied through good policy and great politics.

That means, chiefly, populist financial reform that outpopularizes the right-wing populists. But I'm beginning to think that Obama (and by extension his party) has an additional shot at a truer populist renaissance through the humdinger of an unmistakably progressive nomination to the Supreme Court; and not, as is Obama's wont, a surer thing.

The key here -- in the confirmation process -- is to place in the political forefront this conservative Court's dreadfully offensive decision in Citizens United. Without, of course, tethering the nominee to a stated prejudgment of future and similar cases, Senate progressives can make it clear in those endless cable-news interviews to come that this nominee would never side with, well, those corporatist dogs on the judicial right -- you know, the ones whom corporatist Republicans love.

And why not, Mr. President? Let's face it. You could nominate Mitch McConnell -- and Senate Republicans and their scandalously dyspeptic ultraconservative "think tanks" would still put you and your political allies through a right-wing hell of a confirmation. It's what they do.

So why not further divide and conquer those decidedly anti-big-business Tea Party sympathizers through the nomination of a decidedly progressive judicial mind -- someone, say, along the populist-politico-judicial lines of a William O. Douglas. Then sit back and watch Senate Republicans squirm, as they're forced to defend the Wild West of Wall Street and the wholesale corporate appropriation of the electoral process.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Let The Sun Shine In......