THE GUZZARDI PARTY

Pennsylvania's first-term Republican Tom Corbett has consistently been rated the nation's most vulnerable incumbent governor.  According to the polls, the people don't like or trust him; and certainly women, environmentalists, and the poor have no reason to.  So for quite a while he has been derided as "One-Term Tom".

Like his fellow reactionary governors John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Scott of Florida, Corbett has made a shift to the center in hopes of becoming viable - a shift not on all issues but on one.  Corbett's issue is transportation, which has broad appeal.  This gov, who could get little through his very Republican legislature, did finally manage lately to get through a big transportation bill that was sorely overdue.

But in doing that he either did or didn't break his promise and raise taxes, depending on how you interpret this and that.  The tea partiers say he did, and they're livid.  In trying to make himself acceptable to most Pennsylvanians, he has alienated his right flank.

Tom has a tea party primary opponent, a businessman named Bob Guzzardi who looks like a chipmunk with gray hair and rimless glasses.  While Guzzardi insists that he can win the nomination - he has to say that in order to motivate his voters - he clearly can't.  And I think he knows he can't.  While tea party challengers in other races probably start out believing they can  overcome the incumbent, my surmise is that Guzzardi always knew better.  And this is where it gets interesting.

I'll say more about him and why he's a significant figure further down the page.  Meanwhile, let's take a snapshot of the Republicans' over-all situation.

Around the country tea partiers are going up against what they take to be Republican-In-Name-Only candidates.  But also in some cases especially crazy tea party incumbents are being taken on by Republican regulars who are also reactionary while appearing more plausible.  It's looking like a civil war, one so far limited but potentially all-out.

While business interests funded the tea partiers and deployed them as a weapon, the corporations and the big money people are increasingly viewing them as a pain - as too amateurish, too populist, too unpredictable, too apt to say idiotic things that get Democrats elected, too suspicious of the interface between big gov and big biz that the rich and the corporate leaders want at all hazards to keep intact.

In this new climate, Mitt Romney, plainly once again a presidential contender, has just made what I suspect to be a fatal mistake by criticizing the tea partiers.  This after he sickeningly pandered to them throughout his '12 campaign.  Apparently he sees that his rich friends and fellow biz execs and some of the regulars are putting down the tea partiers and has concluded that it's now safe to do that and be free of them.  UH-uh.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, till now a tea party favorite, the other day suggested that abortion shouldn't be outlawed at this point because public opinion is too divided on it.  That sounds suicidally sane.  What ails Paul?  Maybe the praise he has gotten from liberals on the government privacy issue and his winning several straw polls among conservatives have convinced him that he's invulnerable and can now be candid and sensible.  UH-uh.

(Why is Paul popular, by the way?  I'm not sure.  It may be because he's a new face, because he seems younger than he is, and because he comes across as idealistic rather than negative and cynical.  Or there may be an actual market among right-wingers for his Libertarian Lite positions, including his neo-isolationist foreign policy views.  The latter will be sure to bring relentless attacks from the Repubs' dominant neoconservatives.  A big deal for them is the alleged weakness of the U.S. under Mr. Obama; under Paul it would be even "weaker".  Paul appears to me to be a flake with neo-Confederate sympathies.  We'll see what he's made of, because he's going to be under terrific fire. And with his abortion statement, he may have just made himself look unreliable to his tea party base, not at all an advisable thing to do when he didn't have to.)

And then there's John Ellis "Jeb" Bush.  The tea partiers don't like Bushes, as the latter are the insiders' insiders and the tea partiers the outsiders' outsiders.  Jeb speaks fluent Spanish, is married to a Latina, is a Catholic, and should be in a good position to convince Hispanic voters that a Republican party headed by himself isn't their enemy.  He's for "amnesty", but of course he doesn't phrase it like that.  He has now said that those who risk everything to cross our border from Mexico should be viewed not as criminals but as acting from love of their impoverished families.  The tea partiers thought he was a lefty anyway; this was just rubbing it in.

Romney, Paul, and Bush seem to me to be, as of now, the most favored GOP choices for '16.  All of them may have a tea party problem.

Well,  back to Bob Guzzardi.  How is he unlike other tea party challengers?  I've suggested that he doesn't believe he can win.  I doubt he even wants to.  And there's something else that's distinctive about him.  Bob the Guz has a history of donating money to Democrats who are running against Republicans whom he considers to be RINOs.  From what I'm seeing, he's after vengeance: a pseudo-candidate who would rather elect a Dem than a Repub who has disappointed the tea partiers.  In other words, he wants to make certain that Corbett gets beaten, not in May but in November.

The tea partiers now taking on John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and other regulars are going to lose.
And there's a good chance that they'll also fail to get someone agreeable to themselves nominated for president in '16.  There are Republicans who could satisfy both the tea partiers and the regulars.
Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker and Kansas's Governor and former senator Sam Brownback are two of them, though they could fall in this year's re-election bids.  But the odds are that the regulars will want one of their own to be the nominee, which will allow them some wiggle-room on a few issues, such as a path to citizenship and gay marriage, where flexibility may be necessary to survival.  They can probably defeat tea party presidential candidates rather than appease them - and they probably will want to.

But what happens then?  Does anyone seriously believe that the tea partiers will be good sports and line up behind someone like Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney or perhaps Rand Paul - someone they regard as their enemy?

Like the Confederates, the tea partiers are die-hards with a Lost Cause.  Their Lost Cause is the vanished country that they believe in: a country wholly owned by greedy, intolerant Christian white men.  They require of Republicans complete support for the impossible restoration of that kind of country.  And because the regulars would rather survive than blindly go along with them on that, they feel that they've been betrayed and that the regulars aren't really Republicans but termites crawling in from the larger, moderate culture.

Tea partiers are all-or-nothing people with an acute sense of betrayal.  And if Bob Guzzardi is a harbinger, they may decide that making their betrayers lose, and trying thereby to discredit them and reclaim control of the GOP, takes precedence over every other consideration.

I doubt a Repub can win in '16 unless the party is united, with both regulars and tea partiers satisfied.  That unity is looking less and less probable.  The tea partiers could start a rival party or could just stay home or vote for the Democrats.  What's least believable is that they'll put aside their bitterness and accept the inevitable.