No Seriously. And it couldn't happen to a 'nicer' guy!
by Matt Bai
In
a lot of ways, Dave Brat is your typical tea party-style insurgent
running in a repugican primary this year. He's an economics professor
at a tiny college, a striped-tie, free market enthusiast who decries
debt and immigration. He has the backing of the crankiest wingnut
bloggers and radio hacks, one of whom, Laura Ingraham, appeared with him
at a rally this week.
But Brat isn't running to unseat
some mush-ball moderate or no-name state legislator backed by the local
chamber of commerce. No, Brat's opponent in next Tuesday's primary is
Eric Cantor, the congressman from Virginia's 7th District and the second
most powerful repugican in the House. Which highlights a question
that's becoming more germane as this season of repugican disunion drags
on:
Just how wingnut do you have to be before these wingnut agitators will leave you alone?
I mean, if the needling Cantor
isn't Barack Obama's least favorite repugican on the Hill, he's
certainly vying for the title. It was Cantor, you may recall, who
forcibly put the brakes on John Boehner when the speaker was edging
close to a comprehensive budget deal with the White House in 2011,
because he couldn't stomach $1 trillion-plus in new revenue. He
distinguished himself, during those negotiations, as the one guy in the
room who didn't want a deal and who couldn't be bothered to disguise his
contempt for the president.
Until recently, anyway, Cantor was known around Washington as the tea
party's guy in leadership, a bridge between the pragmatic old guard
(who found him a tick more tolerable than the other young punks) and the
new ideologues (who hoped he might rise up and supplant Boehner as
speaker).
But let's not trifle with all this wearying reality. Instead, let's
look on Dave Brat's website, which features a photo of Obama and Cantor
sharing a heartfelt moment as they emerge from the House chamber
together, like a couple of newlyweds in Utah. The site says Cantor
"distorts the free market" and has "embraced big government."
Brat expanded on this critique when we spoke on the phone a few days
ago. He told me Cantor had thrown his weight behind comprehensive
immigration reform, refused to defund the president's health care plan
and backed down on reducing spending and debt. "In the past few years,
Eric has shifted dramatically, and that's the only way to look at it,"
Brat told me.
Well, maybe not the only
way. Yes, Cantor declared himself open to a reform in the immigration
system that would offer a path to citizenship for children who have
spent their lives here, but, true to form, he opposed the only
bipartisan bill that had a chance of passing. He has led House repugicans in voting no fewer than six times to defund the health care
law (good luck with that), not to mention a few dozen other votes to
strip various provisions.
As for austerity, the Cantor-led repugican caucus overwhelmingly passed Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's
budget plan, which would save billions by converting huge pieces of the
Great Society into block grants and vouchers. ("It solves all the
world's problems, with the possible exception of who should run
Kashmir," is how Grover Norquist, the wingnut anti-tax crusader,
described that plan to me.) It's true that Cantor was one of only 28
House repugicans who voted to lift the debt ceiling without conditions
last February, but that was clearly a show of support for Boehner, not
some sudden burst of statesmanship.
The fact is, if you wanted a
more reliable predictor of wingnut orthodoxy than Cantor, you'd
need IBM's Watson team to build it.
But what's going on here doesn't
have a lot to do with ideology. It's really all about disdain for the
governing establishment, which activists like Brat see as a bunch of
corporate bullies. It turns out that Brat ran for state delegate two
years ago and blames Cantor and his "Henrico mafia" — that is, the repugican cabal of Henrico County, the heart of the 7th District — for
making sure he didn't win. What got Brat most animated when we talked
was the way Cantor had tried to freeze him out at last month's state
party convention by renting out all the conference rooms at the Hilton.
"He's been working in the state
and across the nation to get rid of tea partyers and wingnuts,"
Brat said. "He's caused the fracture in the cabal, not me. He's in bad,
bad shape with the grassroots in his own district."
This last part seems true
enough. No one seriously suspects Cantor, who refused an interview
request, is going to lose the primary next Tuesday, but he got something
of a shock at the convention when agitators booed him during his speech
and rejected his handpicked candidate for county chairman.
Cantor's aides insist the
primary challenge is more of an annoyance than anything else, but that
hasn't stopped them from producing a few million bucks worth of
increasingly shrill TV spots and mailers. Cantor calls Brat a "liberal
college professor" (clearly he's never met Noam Chomsky), and he's told
seniors that Brat wants to take away their Social Security — a pretty
cynical strategy coming from a guy who has had to answer the same
charges from Democrats.
Leaving all that back-and-forth
aside, though, the real question is what the tea party crowd — and in
this I include the Ingrahams and Lush Dimbulbs of the world — thinks
it's really accomplishing in a race like this.
The theory behind running
primary campaigns against incumbents, generally, is that they get you
outsize influence, even if you lose the vast majority of them. Other
incumbents look at whichever of their poor colleagues is having to spend
every last dollar to stave off an embarrassing defeat at the hands of
some activist armed with a Facebook page and a bullhorn, and they think:
I'd better make these people happy, or they'll come after me next. That
strategy has worked pretty well for the tea party so far.
But the strategy works only if
incumbents think they have a reasonable chance of placating the
pitchfork-wielding mob. If leading repugicans can say all the right
things and make all the right votes and lay prostrate before the hate speech
radio demagogues, and still they end up fending off primary
challenges and getting booed out of their own conventions, then they
might just start to wonder: What's the point of all this cowering in the
corner, anyway? If you're going to get slammed no matter what you do,
then why not, you know, actually try to govern?
If Eric Cantor isn't
anti-government, anti-spending, anti-Obama enough to insulate himself
from grass-roots rebellion, then you've got to ask yourself: Who is?
