GOP Spat Coverage Demands Subtext

If you aren’t up on Texas election clashes between Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison, two Republicans competing for the governor’s seat in this state, it’s been all the rage for writers this past week. Check out a few of the pieces available, but do consider an important subtext.

The big one is the Houston Press piece, entitled “Tug of War.” Perry, who reelection last go-around with less than 40 percent of the vote, has tagged his campaign on ultra-right politics. “His anti-federal stimulus, anti-Washington, pro-secessionist rhetoric has tapped into the sentiments of extreme-right, Tea Party activists who see Obama as the anti-Christ and his proposed health-care reforms as Hitlerian,” Sam Merten writes in the Press. “It also serves another purpose: By attacking Washington, he attacks Hutchison, who has spent the last 16 years as a Washington insider.”

Politico agrees, noting, “There is a deep reservoir of animosity between the two leading statewide Republicans, which means the race will be nasty, brutish and expensive.” The story of how the Republican Party will fare ideologically in the face of Democratic defeats in 2008, and what direction the GOP will go, should be news for months to come. Commercial media will be picking up on this drama, of course.

Late in the summer, Texas secessionists rallied in Austin, with Perry’s call for Texas to secede drawing the group much attention. The Texas Observer‘s blog points out Perry’s support for the extreme right has emboldened factions that were once considered fringe Republican elements. Meanwhile, Hutchison is scampering to the right with a Dick Cheney endorsement and pandering to fringers with Obama czar scares.

Gathering Forces put up a more general, though interesting, analysis of the gubernatorial race as an indicator of efforts to push the Republican Party rightward. However, that piece correctly points out the fight is over mostly semantics rather than agreement or disagreement on key ideological issues.

You have to wonder how much this kind of debate is really about the degree and depth to which the Republican Party will sink. Though there seems to be agrement to stand down on anti-Obama rhetoric, virtually none of the Republican stakeholders in these arguments says openly that the GOP should abandon anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and hawkish posturing, nor are any of these sides seriously discussing the destruction rampant deregulation and profiteering has visited upon the health care, insurance and other industries. Even as they fight about whether the intolerance of the Religious Right is the way for the Republicans, it may be doubtful if the overall political approach employed by onetime George W. Bush loyalists is going to pay off in the end.

Another wrinkle is the sheer numbers of people professing belief in what are, at their core, manipulative, far-right ministrations among ultrarightists and moderate Republicans. Swampland points to one of the more bizarre examples of this phenomenon.

POSTSCRIPT: Three Way Fight offers a good analysis on the far-right protests to which Perry seeks to appeal, and left responses to same.