Republicans Hating Republicans

I don't think committed Republicans are going to like reading the same stories us Democrats have been reading for 6 years about our party being in disarray. In truth it's damn near impossible to have your entire caucus in lockstep forever, and while winning masks the differences, losing highlights them. And for the Republicans, it's highlight time.

First there was anger over the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. OK, not so much the firing as the timing of it.

The White House is trying to soothe Republicans who say the party might have fared better on Election Day if President Bush had not waited until after the vote to oust Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld [...]

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested that if Bush replaced Rumsfeld two weeks before the election, voters would not have been as angry about the unpopular Iraq war. Republicans would have gained the boost they needed, according to Gingrich, to retain their majority in the Senate and hold onto 10 to 15 more House seats.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed with that assessment.

Bush should have removed Rumsfeld "as soon as he had made up his mind. And that's a hard thing to calculate. But it's highly doubtful that he made up his mind between the time the election returns came in on Tuesday and Wednesday when Rumsfeld was out."

"And if Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Specter said. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

In truth, my perspective is the firing of Rumsfeld wouldn't have made a damn sight of difference in the election as long as the policy remained the same. Voters were fed up by the results in Iraq, not who was managing them. This is just scapegoating by people who wanted to keep their committee assignments and their jobs.

Then the White House faced criticism over Rumsfeld's replacement Robert Gates, particularly from neocons, who feel he represents a foreign policy realism with which they disassociate. Indeed the entire remaking of the Bush brain trust in the image of his father's team, with Bush 41 in the role of Poppy coming to save the day, has angered those who didn't think Bush Senior ran the best Presidency in terms of foreign policy.

Did 41 help bring Gates to the Pentagon? The White House denies it, but, as a Bush friend told NEWSWEEK, "his fingerprints are all over this." (The friend refused to be identified for fear of alienating the family.) Given the mists of secrecy that envelop the 41-43 relationship, it is striking that the broad Bush circle believes he had a hand in the Rumsfeld succession: as an old CIA director, 41 rarely leaves any clues at all.

This is the realist paleocon vs. fantastical neocon battle that has always been simmering. At this point, the neocons are completely discredited so it's not much of a fight. However, the next major move by the Bush team, to install Mel Martinez as head of the RNC, is slowly becoming a major blunder. Just look at the first couple paragraphs of this Washington Times piece, it says it all:

Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, co-author of a bill to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, has been picked by White House strategist Karl Rove to be general chairman of the Republican National Committee, RNC officials confirmed yesterday.

Some RNC members greeted the news as another example of White House cronyism, reminiscent of President Bush's attempt to name his personal friend and general counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, a nomination withdrawn in response to outrage from the party's conservative supporters.

The hilarious thing about this is that Martinez won't run the party at all. He has day-to-day duties (theoretically) as a Senator, and so the actual operations will be administered by a functionary. But the GOP bled Latino support in last week's election, and so they desperately needed a public Hispanic face to portray a softer image to the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. I'm sure the calls were put out to all the activists saying "Don't worry, he's just a figurehead!" But such an insult to the intelligence of the conservative base almost made it worse, and this controversy is actually growing.

President Bush's decision to back Sen. Mel Martinez to help lead the Republican Party, a move intended to appeal to disaffected Latino voters, drew sharp criticism Tuesday from some of the party's core conservatives, who disdain the Florida lawmaker's support for liberalized immigration laws [...]

Criticism of Martinez came Tuesday from several conservatives, including Curly Haugland, an RNC member from North Dakota, who said he believed the party was far too focused on pandering to minorities.

"We're losing our base in droves because they don't get campaigned to," he said, referring to GOP-leaning conservatives.

Randy Pullen of Arizona, another RNC member and an activist against illegal immigration, likened Martinez's selection to the episode last year in which Bush named his longtime friend and legal counsel to the Supreme Court, only to reverse himself after a furious conservative backlash.

"I'm hoping that it's not another Harriet Miers moment," Pullen said.

The GOP's problem is that they understand the long game, that winning under 30% of the Latino vote will consign them to the minority for decades to come, but they fail to acknowledge that their core base hates brown people. If anything, the election made that bifurcation more stark. The entire leadership of the GOP in the Senate now comes from the South. They're a marginal regional party. And they're bursting apart at the seams.

You know, schedenfreude is wrong... but that's doesn't mean it feels bad to engage in...