THE GOP "PLEDGE TO AMERICA": THE POLITICS OF IRRELEVANCE

The House Republican leadership's "Pledge to America" is amazing. Not for what it says in its 21 pages which few people will read, but that the GOP would even make such a pledge. Public opinion polls show clearly that Congress is very low in public esteem and that low estimate applies to both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. So it is difficult to imagine how the House GOP leadership thinks this will make a difference in the November elections, except that they may see it as giving a last minute Republican voice to the many unhappy voters out there.

The problem for the GOP, however, is that the large pool of disgruntled voters , mostly independents and moderate Republicans we are told, have already been given a voice by the Tea Party (TP). This is a basic distinction between the "Pledge" and Newt Gingrich's l994 "Contract with America" which became both the voice and the policy base for the huge GOP midterm election victory that year. Now it is the TP that has come to be viewed as the voice of the disgruntled. Thus, the "Pledge" is likely to be perceived by most as "too much and too late" and as merely an attempt to play catch up ball with the Tea Party. Put another way, the "Pledge" is "too late" for many voters who have already jumped on board the TP train and it has left the station.

And while the TP has been picking up speed over the past six months, the Republican party, which has become to be viewed as a party of partisan obstructionism in Congress, has been increasingly concerned about what a disruptive force the TP has been. Disruptive in that the Tea Party in pursuit of its own highly vocal, extremist agenda has frequently challenged the GOP by putting up or backing its choice of candidates against those supported by the establishment party. This was most clear in the Senate primaries in Kentucky, Nevada, Alaska, and Delaware. In the process the TP has driven the GOP ideological core toward being even more conservative. So now the establishment GOP is trying to figure out how to gracefully retreat and appear to embrace the TP victors. However, it is not that easy. The primary winners seem to prefer going with the old adage, "dance with the one who brought you", meaning the TP not the GOP.

So too the policy agenda of the new "Pledge to America". It has the appearance of playing catch up ball to allow the party establishment to beat its chests that the GOP is returning to its basic conservative principles which TP followers believe have been abandoned. Also, the "Pledge" is intended to have voters believe that Republicans have a policy agenda for "change" and it is not just the party of "no". But the Tea Party and its fellow travelers have been pursuing their own "change" agenda for some time, an agenda presented in simple terms -- anti-big government, anti-spending, anti-deficits, including some social issues such as anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-immigration reform. Many, and maybe most, unhappy voters have adopted various parts of this agenda as a reflection of their own concerns. They don't need a late-appearing "Pledge" from the establishment GOP to express their policy choices, general or specific. At the general level, the disgruntled seem to be satisfied with the glowing generalities of the TP agenda. At the level of specific policies included in the "Pledge", it is a case of "too much". Tea Party adherents are not interested in specifics, much less pages of specifics (at least by TP standards), which have not been part of the TP political rhetoric. Again, in other words, "don't bore us with details".

In l960 a small book, THE SEMISOVEREIGN PEOPLE, was written by political scientist Elmer Schattschneider. In it he said that the most devastating form of politics was the politics of irrelevance; that is no one cares. (The book should be required reading for any political science student today.) In many respects the Republican party is irrelevant in this November's elections despite efforts by Michael Steel, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnel to make it otherwise. Certainly the GOP as a party will come out of the elections as the winner with a lot of new seats in the House and Senate to be added to the many easy victories of incumbents re-elected from safe districts. But the new winners will owe more to the tone of politics created and amplified to a sometimes toxic level by the Tea Party rather than to any difference the GOP and its return-to-principles "Pledge" will make. This year, the establishment wing of the GOP, except for its campaign money, is rrelevant.