A Hill interview with Mitch McConnell suggests that he and his reelection pollsters are more worried about his local left than his tea-party right, which in itself suggests a kind of subterranean shift in the party at large:
One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid 1990s and the second kick was over the last 16 days. There is no education in the second kick of a mule. There will not be [another] government shutdown.
Naturally, he also threw reassuring alms at the right:
McConnell [said he] told fellow Republican senators that he would not allow [yesterday's] deal to cross two important red lines: it would not raise taxes and it would not undermine the spending reforms achieved under the 2011 Budget Control Act.
And that's what I meant when I speculated earlier about the return of an older-school conservative orthdoxy, which is to say, the party will move from the outright treasonous but stick to the impeccably stupid.
Recent Comments