What the Tea Party Insurgency Can Learn From the Netroots Insurgency

The Republican Party faces a similar opportunity this year. There are about a dozen (if not 18 or 20) House districts that are constitutionally Republican and would swing back to the GOP from Democrats merely if momentum had shifted slightly.  For the most part, the NRCC recruited top flight candidates for these seats, and even though the Democrats have more money, the Republican challengers have enough money to win most of them back. The Tea Party movement has been very successful in finding and running candidates for Senate because of the political economy of scale. But the gap between the threshold level of acceptability between the party and its activist base is wider than the gap between Democrats and the Netroots ever was.  Even as Harry Reid has had to herd cats at times, as many headaches as Democrats have developed from having to deal with an internal affairs force within the party, it will pale in comparison to what Republicans will face in power if they try to adhere to their current norms. But as Emanuel might admit, even with the affection he has for his class 's Democrats, they've made governing a lot harder for the Democrats, pressuring the party's center from the right.  The Democratic struggle -- the internal affairs cops of the left and the cautious conservatives of the right -- is part of the reason why it seems as if the party has no clear agenda.  

What lessons will the Republican Party take from the Democrats?  They DON'T have -- or won't have -- a cadre of moderate House Republicans to pressure them from the center. The gravitation force will pull the party to the right.  Every incentive structure will shift to favor a party that resists anything that the Democrats or the White House propose--even more so than now.

And Republicans in power now will resist that, because they know that demography is not in their favor, and that midterms can skew the cast of an electorate temporarily.  There's no question that the GOP will have to integrate the Tea Party into its processes, procedures and culture. That means that they will have to be very sensitive to perception ... to, say, the presidential primary rules,  making sure that the party appears to have little power to set limits and select delegates.  It means that the GOP will need to keep its distance from Washington lobbyists, assuming that the Tea Partiers will genuinely do the sort of internal policing that the Netroots currently do for Democrats. It means that the GOP will need a significant, credible Tea Party figure in its leadership ranks at a high level immediately after the election.  It also means that the party will need to find a way to demonstrate to regular Americans, 80 percent of whom either dislike or have no opinion of the Tea Party, that they are merely a party that ventilates rage, but a party that can govern and get things passed even in an environment where senators are going to be objecting to unanimous consent votes much more regularly.