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David Brooks believes the "Palin spasm" of the GOP is finally over - that a return to sanity is imminent judging from those elected during midterms.
"During the Palin spasm, Republicans seemed to detest the craft of governing. Hothouse flowers like Senator Ted Cruz preferred telegenic confrontation to compromise and legislation.
But current party leaders are talking about incremental progress, finding areas where they can get bipartisan support: on trade, corporate taxes, the XL oil pipeline, the medical devices tax, patent reform, maybe even tax reform generally."
Has the tea party finally run its course? One can hope. But inevitably there had to be an end, because without Barack Obama to identify against, there is no Tea Party ala Palin and Cruz.
When we started this project in 2009, one big question I had was where does the GOP end and the Tea Party begin? For a long time, Republicans themselves didn't understand the difference - or even the question. It has puzzled me time and time again why the GOP didn't jettison their crazies and take back their party - and while that answer isn't a simple one, and there were multiple advantages to letting the Tea Party run rampant, the GOP does now seems poised to let them go - to push them out if necessary.
Now they're talking Jeb Bush for President (ahem - see my analysis of his speech to CPAC two years ago - I called that one) and Jeb is most definitely NOT a tea party yahoo. In that speech then he called for GOP values of exactly the type of thing Brooks wrote about today - they aren't the crazy policies of the Tea Party - and it doesn't involve Sarah Palin - at all.
But for those of you who miss Sarah, I saw on my Roku the other day an ad for the Sarah Palin channel. Don't know anything else about it, but I'm willing to bet it isn't a free channel.
'via Blog this'
