Debt Ceiling Stalemate Illustrates the Tea Party's Reality Gap
Robert Schlesinger

Tea Party's Reality Gap

Americans like compromise, which is antithetical to the GOP's ruling class

Remember the old Mario Cuomo truism that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose? It neatly encapsulated the necessary gap between the campaign trail and the halls of power: You seek office aspirationally, but once elected you must cooperate with reality. And the reality of our system of government is that it requires deal-making and compromise, a notion which even grade schoolers grasp with the concept of checks and balances. As President Obama noted in one of his recent press conferences, American democracy works when people are "willing to make some sensible compromises to solve big problems."

Indeed Obama is the poster child for the reality gap between rhetoric and governance. His impressive record of accomplishment is unsatisfying to progressives who feel he promised more (and is too ready to seek "sensible compromise"). Perhaps it is fitting, then, that arrayed in opposition to Obama is a party of self-described conservatives seemingly intent on rewriting the basic political rule that compromise makes the government go 'round.

What we have witnessed as the debt ceiling debate of 2011 has unfolded is the logical result of a politics of purity that has grown in the GOP in recent years. It found full voice last year in the Tea Party movement, which prided itself on its promises of inflexibility, rooted in the conventional wisdom canard that the country is fundamentally conservative. Any GOP losses, the thinking goes, are voters' punishment of insufficient ideological fidelity, so the appropriate response is not moderation but retrenchment. (Never explained is why conservatives would stray in the first place if their philosophy is so popular.)

As a matter of campaign politics, the purity promise last year was a mixed blessing for the GOP. Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, Nevada's Sharron Angle, and Colorado's Ken Buck -- Tea Party favorites who won primaries against more electable alternatives -- cost the Republicans three winnable Senate seats.

Many pundits predicted that once in office, the House GOP majority would adapt to the rules of governance, likely by the party leaders harnessing and containing the wild-eyed newcomers. But the pundits didn't understand the extent to which absolutism has infected the GOP. Likewise, however, the GOP puritans fail to understand that they are subject to the rules of politics no matter how much they wish to ignore them, in the same way a falling man is subject to gravity regardless of how much he denies it to the approaching ground.

This is what gravity looks like, in the context of the debt ceiling fight: A CBS News poll released last week found that 71 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Republicans, disapprove of the way the GOP has handled the situation. Earlier this month Quinnipiac University released a poll showing 48 percent of Americans would blame Republicans if the debt ceiling wasn't raised, as opposed to only 34 percent who would blame Obama. And why? Because despite Tea Party dogma, Americans like compromise, not obstinacy. A Gallup poll last week found that 66 percent of Americans -- including 57 percent of GOPers -- favor compromise in the debt ceiling debate over a hard-line stand. Last week Gallup reported that 20 percent of Americans want to reduce the deficit the GOP way (cutting spending alone) while 69 percent want both cuts and new revenue. In short, Americans prefer Obama's approach on both substance and style.

Where does that leave the GOP?

Caught in a political feedback loop with its fringe marching it -- to use Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's phrase when he flew the debt ceiling white flag this month -- "into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy." McConnell, a politician experienced enough to know how things work, surrendered in the face of economic reality. Unwilling to crash the economy, he proposed a solution wherein Obama would get to raise the debt ceiling while the GOP repeatedly scored political points off of him for it. But McConnell was, literally, denounced as a Judas by the party's base. They see no reason to give ground in a debate they frankly don't understand.

While a Washington Post/Pew poll last week found that 8 in 10 Tea Party supporters feel they understand the debt limit issue well, only 19 percent were concerned that not raising the ceiling would force the government into default. Another poll from the same source found that 65 percent of Tea Party supporters don't see any problems with the United States hitting its debt ceiling. This would be funny but for the stakes and but for the fact that these are the people running the GOP. For every McConnell, willing to find a path back from the brink, there are brink-deniers like Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota or Louie Gohmert of Texas, who cribbed from Franklin Roosevelt this month, telling reporters that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And there are brink-embracers like Indiana freshman Rep. Todd Rokita , who blithely said that, "We'll learn to live within our means right now. ... And this might force that issue, even if the economy does ... go down, the economy might get worse." Burn the economy down, then, so we can build it back up.

The fact is that the politics of purity lead to governance of dysfunction. Under most circumstances that means gridlock, which is a problem. But it's one endemic to the system and one where the harm of inaction can be mitigated and contained through things like elections and public pressure. But the debt ceiling crisis is such that Tea Partyers willing to ignore the rhetoric-governance reality gap can do catastrophic harm before the system can correct them.

Twitter: @ihavenet

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