Bitter & Sweet

The letter, obtained Thursday by CNN, was co-signed by a fleet of top conservative activists including former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Let Freedom Ring founder Colin Hanna and Tea Party Express chairman Amy Kremer.

It asks McConnell, Boehner and Barbour to “go before the American people jointly and present a unified vision of what this Republican victory will stand for” – namely lower taxes, reducing the size of government, a commitment to “restoring traditional moral values” and a muscular foreign policy.

An "easy for YOU to say" statement if ever there was one. Eeyore hits them right between the eyes with both barrels:

First of all, didn’t the GOP already present a “unified vision” of core principles (sans the “traditional moral values” part) just two months ago in the Pledge To America? I’m not sure what the signatories here want beyond that; if they have specific policies in mind that they want enacted, identifying them would have been much more useful than simply reciting the usual “These Things I Believe” list of conservative values.

Second, I’m intrigued by what they say in the letter about “reducing government spending to only those functions entrusted to it in our great constitution.” Is that a hint that it’s time to reform Social Security and Medicare, or are those two budget-wrecking programs part of the core conservative agenda imagined here? (See what I mean about how useful specificity would have been?) The more I watch tea party honchos rant against government spending and big government, the more frustrated I am that, for all their ardor, only very rarely do they squarely address the problem of entitlements and what aging Baby Boomers will mean for it. Even the tea party’s “Contract from America” doesn’t touch the third rail: It dances around it, demanding a balanced budget and tax reform, calling for a statutory cap on spending, and proposing a task force on fiscal responsibility, but never are any of the old entitlements specifically targeted. (By contrast, the Contract explicitly calls for repealing ObamaCare and rejecting cap-and-trade.) The greatest thing the tea party could do for fiscal responsibility is to simply start talking about this; doing so won’t land entitlement reform on the national agenda immediately, but putting the idea in people’s heads will at least prepare the ground for it.

And here I thought that the greatest sins in tighty-righty eyes were hypocrisy and cowardice. My biggest concern for the 112th Congress is that the Tea Party grassroots, having just triumphed in a cycle where hurricane-force winds were at their back and almost everything went their way, will expect to get every last agenda item handed to them on an engraved silver platter as though the Dems don't still have the Senate and Red Barry isn't still in the White House, and then blame it on the "establishment" went they receive gridlock instead.

Frankly, a manifesto of banal generalities is the last thing I would have expected to come from this bunch; indeed, a laundry list of risibly unrealistic legislative demands would have guaranteed them the "moderate betrayal" they'll be looking for to justify another Democrat-helping "RINO" primary purge. How does leaving the performance of Speaker Boehner and the elderly Campbell's Soup kid over the next two years in the eye of the beholder bolster the preconceived tighty-righty case for their "failure"?

FWIW, entitlements privatization will have to wait for unified GOP government starting in 2013 - if it's still achievable by then. And that unified GOP government will never happen if Boehner and McConnell try to take it on now.

How's that as grounds for 2012 GOP primary challenges?