Kyle Melinn's excellent column

by: Eric B.

Fri Aug 31, 2012 at 12:00:00 PM EDT

There used to be a joke hereabouts that Bill Schuette and Dave Camp were gay lovers. It was a joke, mind you, and not one I think anyone who told it really thought through the gay rights prism. It -- the joke -- was predicated on the idea that the two of them were basically the same person: in person nice to the point of being downright genial, and in office non-ideologically driven standard-issue, bland white guy Republicans. Neither man, when they served in Congress, was going to make the Sunday morning shoutfests based purely on their ability to shout as loud or louder than the other guy. They were elected to just be quiet, in-the-corner Republicans.

That was the early- and mid-90s. Today is something entirely different, and so is the Republican Party to which both claim membership. It's useful context, however, in understanding why both have evolved politically the way they have. Dave Camp is still mostly a bland white guy (his complete lack of feistiness have helped him cruise below everyone's radar to where he is now chairman of the Ways and Means Committee), and Schuette is running for governor by turning the office of the state's attorney general into that of a partisan flack to appeal to the business interests and rightwing zealots of his party so that he can avoid the mistakes of Mike Cox and secure its nomination for governor when benevolent overlord Rick Michigan is term limited out of office.

Why have both men gone that route? Kyle Melinn, in the City Pulse, explains.

It’s because Tea Party activists have nearly completely taken over the Michigan Republican Party. 

Most other Michiganders spend their nights and weekends working on their lawn, taking the kids to soccer or dance or catching up on life. Lathered-up Tea Party folks are flooding local and state Republican meetings and getting their people elected to key leadership posts.

Former Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis, potentially the most accessible GOP activist of all time, didn’t stand a chance against super-conservative Dave Agema in this past May’s Republican National Committeeman race.

Two years prior, solidly conservative Republican Bill Schuette nearly didn’t win the nomination for attorney general and former Michigan State University Trustee Don Nugent failed to win his party’s nomination for re-election.

Their crimes? They were “establishment” and just not right enough.

Thankfully, his piece is free of that phony-baloney balance that would have blamed Democrats equally in the Republican Party's hard-right tilt. There are problems with that organization, but they have little to do with the fact that the Republican Party has embraced the notion that anyone who compromises is guilty of Chamberlain-like appeasement.

It should be noted somewhere, however, that this is mostly a self-inflicted wound. This is the same Republican Party whose elected leaders have made defeating the sitting president, not fixing the nation's problems, as their top Congressional priority, who voted unanimously against a health care reform bills based largely on their ideas, and who spent six months whipping the Tea Party base into their lather with talk of "death panels" and other provably false horseshit.

It'd also be nice to see some mention not just of the potential for being unelectable but being a party based on fantasy-based policy making. That is, the same people who wanted to bounce Bill Schuette from the A.G. slot (and who tried to revolt against Brian Calley for lieutenant governor) actually believed that nonsense about death panels, think that you can opt to not pay bills (i.e. raise the debt ceiling) without imperliing the nation's credit rating, and insist that global warming isn't real.