The Tea Party lot are crowing that they have forced Bart Stupak to retire. They have done no such thing. Their noisy but peripheral astroturfing has no influence on the Republican Party, never mind the Democrats. Scott Brown, anyone? Sarah Palin's campaigning for John McCain against JD Hayworth? If Rand Paul is nominated in Kentucky, then rather deeper, and nobler, forces will have been at play.
Note that the Tea Party lot are wholly indifferent to pro-life and pro-family causes, which they never mention, just as they never attack the collosally expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Bush Administration's vast extensions of federal government power over private life. Taxed Enough Already? Limited government, in strict accordance with the Constitution?
No, if Bart Stupak has been forced out at all, then he has been forced out by the PUMA people, who have organised a primary challenge to him. Universal healthcare involving nothing more than an entrenchment of the long-existing ban on federal funding of abortion, itself passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter, is not good enough for them. It had to have been universal healthcare with repeal of that provision, even if that had meant no universal healthcare at all. Being anti-war doesn't exactly help matters where the PUMAs are concerned, either.
Well, they can have their little bit of gloating this time. What else do they have, after all? But I am not at all convinced that we have heard the last of Bart Stupak. The 2016 Presidential Election beckons, perhaps not for him, but in that case more than plausibly for Marcy Kaptur, a Progressive Caucus member unlike Stupak. She never endorsed either Clinton or Obama, because neither was sufficiently opposed to the "free" trade that had devastated, and was continuing to devastate, her District. And, since apparently it matters, she is a woman.
A pro-life woman seeking the Democratic nomination has happened before. But never on a full platform of policies. And certainly never from the populist, anti-war Left. One to watch? Watch, and pray.
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Kaptur will be 70 in 2016.
ReplyDeleteSo what?
ReplyDeleteIs Rand Paul really "bring home the troops" antiwar or just "I didn't think it was a good idea to go in there" like Obama was before he was elected? He certainly does not talk with the clarity that Ron Paul does.
ReplyDeleteBob D
That's now quite a fine line, and growing finer. Anyone in either camp would oppose war with Iran, for example.
ReplyDeleteRand Paul is really for bringing home the troops.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think there is some element of foreign policy where he is less radical than his father (perhaps he does not theoretically deny a "war on terror"). But they are 95% the same.