Republicans Eye Wall Street's Cash

Eric Cantor has convinced many teabaggers that he’s one of them while simultaneously soliciting GOP campaign donations from Wall Street.

Although I’m not sure how much press it will get, there was a pretty telling statement in today’s Wall Street Journal from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R – Virginia). In an article about the Republican Party attempting to score big campaign contributions from giant financial institutions, Cantor is quoted as saying, “I sense a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of buyer’s remorse on Wall Street,” referring to Wall Street’s decision to back primarily Democrats in the 2008 election cycle. Of course, those contributions may have had more to do with the fact that Wall Street was trying to curry some favor with the Democrats who were poised for sweeping victories, rather than a belief that Democrats would better serve their interests.

But now the momentum has shifted. Teabagging amnesiacs are loudly calling for a return to sanity in governance, by which they mean a return to Republican rule. The economy is still in rough shape and the Democrats are not looking good heading into November’s midterms. Meanwhile, the GOP is in the process of trying to co-opt the tea party movement by superficially playing the role of the everyman’s opposition to the “big government” Democrats, despite the fact that Republicans are mostly to blame for the vast increases in federal power and the national debt over the last decade. The same article notes than House Minority Leader John Boehner (R – Ohio) recently had drinks with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon in an effort to woo him and his firm’s money to the GOP.

So what we have here is some clearly duplicitous conduct by the Republican Party leadership. One day they’re playing to the “populist” tea party folks who decry “big government” and Wall Street bailouts. The next day they’re cozying up to the same banking oligarchs that the teabaggers have it in for. Granted, the tea party people are fixated more on phantom socialism than anything else, but at least in theory they don’t want government and Wall Street fucking each other, even if they don’t know coitus when they see it.

Will the Republican Party be able to chase down campaign donations from the criminal banking syndicate in Lower Manhattan while at the same time credibly maintaining the guise of champion for the average Joe? Probably. By and large, Republicans are more adept at shaping the public political discourse than Democrats, even if they are more transparently full of shit than the Dems (who are also very full of shit). Although several congressional Republicans will face purity tests during the primaries in the form of teabagger-backed Republicans, the general elections will play out rather predictably. Here’s Noam Chomsky writing in 1996 about the 1994 midterm elections, to which the 2010 elections are already being compared:

The standard picture is that a “historic political realignment” took place in the congressional elections of 1994 that swept Newt Gingrich and his army into power in a landslide victory, a “triumph of conservatism” that reflects the continuing “drift to the right.” With their “overwhelming popular mandate,” the Gingrich army will fulfil the promises of the Contract with America. They will “get government off our backs” so that we can return to the happy days when the free market reigned and restore “family values,” ridding us of “the excesses of the welfare state” and the other residues of the failed “big government” policies of New Deal liberalism and the “Great Society.” By dismantling the “nanny state,” they will be able to “create jobs for Americans” and win security and freedom for the “middle class.” And they will take over and successfully lead the crusade to establish the American Dream of free market democracy, worldwide.

That’s the basic story. It has a familiar ring.

Does it ever. Chomsky continues,

When asked about the central components of the Contract [with America], large majorities opposed almost all, notably the central one: large cuts in social spending. Over 60 percent of the population wanted to see such spending increased at the time of the elections. Gingrich himself was highly unpopular, even more than Clinton, whose ratings are very low; and that distaste has only persisted as the program has been implemented.

As usual, this campaign season GOP candidates will step up the rhetoric against “big government” and “tax-and-spend liberals,” while avoiding substantive discussion of their own preferred economic policies for the reasons Chomsky noted above. We need only recall the attempt by Republicans to “reform” Social Security by dismantling/privatizing it in the wake of George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. After a public uproar, the issue quickly went away. We can envision a similar backlash if Medicare is ever a target of Republican “reform” as well. While Republicans are sure to talk about wonderful sounding things like “job creation,” tax cuts,” and “getting government off our backs” (i.e., deregulation) on this year’s campaign trail, discussion of these issues will be rather cursory.

Of course, as I noted in my post about the hypocrisy of the teabaggers, they favor “big government” and “socialism” when it directly benefits them, especially if it’s in the form of Social Security and Medicare. I doubt they despise the nanny state so much as to forgo their own entitlements, even as they ridicule entitlements for others.

Barring a terrorist attack or some unforeseen scandal, the economy will be the big issue in November. However, that doesn’t mean the GOP cannot also run on their traditional bullshit issues of illegal immigration, abortion, gay marriage, and anything else that doesn’t really affect the majority of the population. In fact, it wouldn’t be an American political campaign season without this stuff playing some role in quite a few of the races.

I suspect that the Cantor remark about how disaffected Wall Street is with the Democrats will not hurt his party. Not only that, I predict that the Republican Party will successfully co-opt the tea party movement simply by telling them what they want to hear. It is to be expected that a few GOP incumbents will lose to more conservative primary challengers, but don’t expect anything earth-shattering to happen. The Republicans have been successfully manipulating their base for over a quarter of a century, and by now they have it down to a science. You’ll notice that even when conservatives are in power, they fail to deliver for the people who voted them in, always leaving them angry at the increasing acceptance of gays and abortion, for example. At the same time, once in power, Republicans strive to enact economic policies that are incredibly damaging to the middle class. And that’s how the GOP wants it. That way, they can always run on social issues and blame the sorry state of America on illegal immigrants and a perceived moral decline in the country. But if gay marriage and abortion were made forever illegal all of a sudden, a large chunk of the modern GOP’s raison d’être would subsequently disappear. So while it does Republicans well to speak out against these “immoral” practices, it does them no good to actually do something about them. That’s what scapegoats are for. The problem is, if you finally send that scapegoat out into the desert, there is nothing else on which to pile sins.

- Max