Explaining Congressional Conservatives’ Back-to-the-Future Tactics

Eve Fairbanks mulls the eerie similarities between the McCain campaign and the tactics being employed by congressional conservatives. This is something I had some fun with yesterday, and it’s really striking. While moderates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlie Crist, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter are trying to cut deals with the new, popular president the Republican Party’s conservatives are just recycling McCain-era gambits.

Dave Weigel wonders particularly about the obsession with alleged pork, observing that “Republicans sound strange when they attack the president for tiny spending outlays and unemployment benefits when most Americans are only aware of the local news stories they see about where the stimulus money is going, locally.”

I think this is arguably the downside of the much-bemoaned-by-progressives continued conservative dominance of what Josh Marshall’s termed the “para-government” here in DC. On the one hand, these guys are probably pretty in touch with their districts—they represent the conservative, Obama-hating minority of the country. And they’re in touch with the views of their donors, as are the conservative think tanks. What supplements that is DC conventional wisdom. But the DCCW is, for now, still so wired-up to conservative presuppositions that it doesn’t offer a meaningful check on the right-wing hothouse atmosphere. It just tells Republicans back what they want to hear.