Dance With Who Brung You

You got to dance with who brung you
Swing with who swung you
Don't be a fickle fool
You came here with a gal
Who has always been your pal
Don't you leave her for the first unattached girl, it just ain't cool
You got to dance with who brung you
Swing with who swung you
Life ain't no forty-yard dash
Be in it for the long run
'Cause in the long run you'll have more fun
If you dance with who brung you to the bash

Republicans from Bill Frist to Tim Pawlenty would do well to review their dance cards before the 2006 elections.

Hugh Hewitt is furious over the Senate Republicans' (remember, the majority party?) failure to pass the "Constitutional option" that would have ended filibusters against judicial nominees:

Not one dime more for the NRSC from me unless and until the Supreme Court nominee gets confirmed, and no other filibusters develop. I won't spend money on a caucus supporting organization when the caucus can't deliver a majority. Mark Kennedy and other Senate candidates with spines, but not for the NRSC.

The fetching Margaret Strom, one of the gals and guys who brought Governor Tim Pawlenty to the bash, is clear-eyed in her disillusionment over The Gov's Strib-tickling cigarette tax and his administration in general:

I am not exactly a naif when it comes to politics. No matter how much I love my guy or gal (whoever he or she is) during the endorsement battles and elections, I just know in the back of my mind that this person will betray me, betray the issues and the causes I believe in. That's politics and politics is about compromise and the need to be pragmatic. But that compromise needs to be in the service of some larger vision. Otherwise, it is power for its own sake and there is no more corrupting influence in politics. Pawlenty ran as a conservative Republican so most of us believed that that vision was about smaller, less intrusive Government, attained not just by cutting taxes and cutting budgets but by reform. Pawlenty brought so much energy into the office, with all his talk of "change agents" that when you look at what he has done, the contrast is more than a little shocking. Maybe even more shocking than Ventura's "we shocked the world" campaign followed by the quintessential establishment administration.

In his open letter to the governor, King Banaian tries to rehabilitate him with Conservative Econ 101:

The first thing we need to do is keep your eyes on what is important, and what is important is not the size of the deficit, but the size of government. The problem with ever proposing to put up taxes is that it requires, if you're a fiscal conservative, having enough votes later down to take them down. The problem with cigarette taxes is that once they are put up, there isn't a constituency clamoring to take them down, because smokers are a minority. If you raise cigarette taxes, then, you've made sure that government gets permanently bigger. That is not just a "bad thing", that is the baddest thing when you are a fiscal conservative.

What worries me the most is the effect that this mass "majority party" syndrome will have on Republican activists down where I live, at the grassroots level. One such activist and contributor put it to me this way today in an e-mail:

Matt, my wife and I are so fed up with the recent capitulation of the Republican party and the Republican Senators on the judicial appointments. We are stepping back for any time and financial support/commitments. Not only did we both work the phones on 3 different days, probably (20-25) hours total; I worked a St. Paul precinct as a poll challenger. If our party doesn't know how to act when they won the election and are in the majority, if they don't turn this thing around, it's the last active support you will get from our family. There are 5 eligible voters in this family, all Republican at this time. You need to pass the word up the line, we are not happy campers on this end. Maybe we should have run McCain, as it looks like he is running the show anyway.