Ken Bewitz
How does the Republican conservative base feel about their current “leadership”?
Here are the firsttwo paragraphs of W. James Antle III\’s article at theweek.com. See if they give you a hint:
When conservatives held a Washington, D.C., rally last week in opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran, which names do you suppose inspired the loudest boos from the crowd? Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry would be good guesses. So would Iran\’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But none of those are the right answer.
Instead, it was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, the two most important Republican leaders in Washington, who seemed to get the loudest boos. When Dave Brat, who won his Virginia congressional seat by beating then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a GOP primary last year, mentioned the pair, the conservative crowd erupted in a thunder of boos.
Why would conservatives boo McConnell and Boehner – and why (this is me talking now) would those boos likely have come from a great many Republican moderates as well?
Because McConnell and Boehner are perfectly happy to “play ball” in congress, by making strongly-worded pronouncements on issues important to their party, but then engaging in exactly the same kind of cloakroom-deal politics that Democrats have used against Republicans in the past…with the result that voters don\’t get what they were promised, at the hands of their own people.
Do Democrat leaders pull this kind of crap on Democrats? Not very often. But, by contrast, to a great many Republicans McConnell and Boehner are seen as Bait-And-Switch-Central.
Antle III continues:
Republicans havepromised conservatives many things over the years: balanced budgets, a smallerfederal government, a restoration of school prayer, the reversal of Roev. Wade, the rollback of various liberal programs and policies, mostrecently and significantly the massive health care law popularly known asObamaCare.
Very few of thosepromises have been kept, save for the balanced budget the 1990s RepublicanCongress achieved in concert with Bill Clinton. The GOP majorities thatfollowed then blew those budget surpluses with the help of the next Republicanpresident, George W. Bush.
Since the saintedRonald Reagan left town, the national Republican Party has overpromised andunder-delivered
The issue here is not whether we like every promise (I know I don\’t). the issue is whether you mean what you say and say what you mean, instead of being a political hack insider. And McConnell and Boehner perform like political hack insiders.
Little wonder the people they are baiting and switching – their own constituents – don\’t like it.
Time for a change.
