Adapt Or Die

And speaking of that GOP civil war, there's strong evidence (especially considering this week's CPAC events and the Mount Vernon statement) that the war has already been fought and won by the Teabaggers.  Jacob Heilbrunn at the LA Times:

The Mount Vernon statement thus aims to relegate the free-spending George W. Bush era and President Obama to the sidelines and to reinvent the conservative movement in its original small-government image.

At the same time, it tries to paper over the differences between social conservatives, libertarian conservatives and neoconservatives by reminding "economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America's safety and leadership role in the world." In papering over those differences, however, it lacks the fire and energy of the original Sharon statement.

If the Mount Vernon statement represents a lofty attempt to restate conservative principles, the practical blueprint for the right's attempt to assimilate the tea party's adherents is contained in an important article by Ramesh Ponnuru and Kate O'Beirne in the Feb. 22 National Review. Ponnuru and O'Beirne flatly reject the doomsayers such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, who suggests that the tea party could be "the ruin of the [Republican] party." Ponnuru and O'Beirne liken taking the tea partyers onboard to the debates that surrounded allying the GOP with the Christian right during the 1970s. They define the problem out of existence: Some of the tea partyers may be "rough around the edges" but "are not unpopular and their views are not extreme."

The job of the GOP is to form coalitions with the tea partyers, they say, or go out of business. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele has been playing footsie with the tea partyers, discussing the November election with about 30 of their leaders Tuesday.

Whether the GOP can permanently harness the energies of the tea party, however, is another matter. The insurgent party may well drive the GOP so far to the right that it proves something of an albatross in November. It's also hard to see how the GOP could deliver on the tea party's demand for cutting federal entitlement programs, which is political suicide. Indeed, Republicans might well prove as ineffectual as Democrats in attacking the deficit, which they compiled in the first place during the Bush presidency.

Nice to see somebody in the Village remind us that the Republicans were doing the deficit spending thing long before Obama ever even took office.  But the problem still exists for the Republicans:  in order to win in 2010 and 2012, they need the Birthers, the Tenthers, and the Paulites.  To get the Birthers, the Tenthers and the Paulites, GOP candidates will have to do things like campaign on impeaching Obama because he's not a US citizen, allowing states to take steps towards effectively seceding from the United States of America, and abolishing federal entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security (oh and jobless benefits, too.)

I'm thinking that's going to be rather difficult for the new Teabagger candidates to win on, and impossible for the current Republican incumbents to win on in a general election.

But...embrace them or lose, say the Winger pundits.  The Hoffman Effect is a Hobson's choice.  Republican gains in November may be far, far less than currently advertised.  The old guard is warning that disaster is coming, and the new school says disaster is already here.

This is when the Dems need to drive that wedge.