"Messy"

E.J. Dionne: 

[I]t’s a mistake to dismiss the passage of a real, honest-to-goodness budget through both houses of Congress as a minor event. The deal ... may be small, but it represents a major recalibration of forces inside the Republican Party....

In arriving at a relatively down-the-middle deal with Murray and the Democrats to avoid a government shutdown and further gridlock, Ryan was ... defying what has been the prevailing [non-compromise] view among his party’s rank and file.

Dionne introduces that generous interpretation--his interpretation--of the budget deal with the broader observation that the GOP's present sprawl of exceptional incoherence is "even messier than it looks." That's sort of a backdoor confession that any attempt to interpret the sprawl is as likely as not to be prodigiously wrong, which I believe Dionne's is, which belief on my part could, accordingly, be just as wrong as Dionne's. But because contemporary GOP politics are not of this world, all of us outsider analysts still planted on earth get a free shot.

On the one hand Dionne argues a "major recalibration of [GOP] forces," yet on the other he further concedes that tea party "champions"--those who supposedly lost against the older "establishment" in Ryan's budget deal--"have lifted strategy and tactics to the level of principle." There, I agree with Dionne. Yet agreeing with Dionne there turns out to clash with, if not negate, Dionne's premise here, once again: that Ryan executed a "major recalibration." 

How's that? Ryan (and those who followed his lead) did what he did not out of honored principle, but mere strategy and tactics. He grasped the calamitous outcome of his party's October shutdown and decided a repeat of it would be unthinkable (which is what made the emaciated budget deal so Democratically craven). Purely tactical, as were the deal's purely imaginary deficit trimmings.

From a more strategic standpoint, Ryan & Co. can now proceed, without interruptions, with tea-party-like ravings about another debt-ceiling donnybrook, as well as with nihilistic assaults on Obamacare. There's not a smidgeon of principle in either prong; they're nothing but midterm politics--the now-standard, undifferentiated GOP politics of rejectionist brutality.

And in that, there's no "major recalibration" that I can see.

Dionne also asserts:

When Ryan declared that he had to make a deal because "elections have consequences," he was making a fundamental concession to the view Obama has been advancing: that with the Democrats still holding the White House and the Senate, compromise is unavoidable if governing is to happen.

A concession it was, perhaps, but not a fundamental concession. What I heard in Ryan's remark was a call to arms; in part, a squeal that he did what he did only because he lacked the juice to do any other, but mostly an admonition of GOP forces for failing to wipe Democrats from the political map last year--so that the GOP would never again be forced to compromise, the very concept of which remains an Obamian obscenity in the GOP's pornographic mind.

A "major recalibration"? I think not.

 

Comments

[AnneJ]

I doubt that there is any good intention behind anything Paul Ryan does. Sure he helped pass a lousy budget deal, but then he turned around and warned that the debt ceiling won't be raised without sacrifice from the democrats. I wasn't at all surprised that we're back here again. I think that he thinks the republicans can take advantage of the bad health care roll out and the president's falling poll numbers to their advantage even if their numbers are worse than his. Meet the new Paul Ryan same as the old Paul Ryan.

[Peter G]

I'm going to go with Dionne on this one but plead an explanation. I agree that the recalibration is purely pragmatic politics on the part of the Republicans. They were right to do so since the politics of endless confrontation was killing them.
Which is why I wonder why you think the Democrats would have been wise to pick up the flag of confrontation? What point is there to that? Identify your party as the obstructionist one? Make clear your breast beating was just for show before you surrender? I see no point in that at all.

The distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans is this. The Democrats can compromise without a primary assault. The Republicans are going to face exactly that. Anyone who cares to take that walk on the right wing wild side can see there is no understanding or forgiveness there of Ryan or Boehner or McConnell or anyone not rigidly conservative. They, in turn, are not being coddled or humored by leadership anymore and that leadership has to know what the debt ceiling debate is going to bring. The Democrats can afford to compromise yet every time the Republicans do it brings them closer to collapse. To me this has the feel of mid March. About 1861.