How Many House Republicans Are Up For Cruzification?

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal was celebrating a shady, little know right-wing ideologue and GOP operative for the glory the Republicans have heaped on themselves in recent weeks with the government shut down and impending default debacle. As you probably guessed this whole calamity for the nation has more authors than just Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and a bunch of fringy Michele Bachmann/Louie Gohmert loons in the House. Michael Needham is the 31-year-old president of Heritage Action, DeMint's attack machine. "I really believe we are in a great position right now," he told the Journal.

Though Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is the public face of the high-risk strategy to "defund" ObamaCare, the masterminds behind it are a new generation of young conservatives, chief among them Mr. Needham. From a tactical view, the strategy has been deployed with precision. In August, only Mr. Cruz and a band of renegade tea-party Republicans in the House favored this approach, and the media collectively scoffed. But by September, House Republicans couldn't pass a budget without attaching the defunding rider that has grounded much of government.

"We rallied the conservative grass roots across the country," Mr. Needham says, and ran ads in more than 100 districts on the health law. It worked. During the August recess, these activists demanded that their members of Congress stop ObamaCare.

To most observers, who think the GOP is losing this fight, Mr. Needham's optimism that Republicans will carry the day may seem astonishing. But Mr. Needham says the second-guessers are wrong.

…Mr. Needham is not apologetic at all for the shutdown that he sees as regrettable but necessary collateral damage if it focuses the public on the horrors of the health-care law. "I think people who don't follow politics as closely as you and I do, which is most normal people, only pay attention when something major's going on. Why is there a government shutdown going on? Because the Republican Party wants to get rid of ObamaCare," says the highly disciplined Mr. Needham, who rarely strays from that message.

Mr. Needham and another young activist, Tim Chapman, wrote the business plan for Heritage Action four years ago. The idea was to tap Heritage's network of conservative donors across the country and create a political lobbying machine to carry conservative ideas across the goal line.

"We were always frustrated that whenever we met with Congress, there were always 30,000 lobbyists lined up in the waiting room on the other side," he says. "We felt that to market our policy ideas successfully in 21st-century Washington, D.C., required going above the heads of members of Congress directly to their constituents who shared our conservative values."

…Mr. Needham is a Stanford business-school grad, conservative to the core, uncompromising and skilled in the smash-mouth politics now played in Washington. His first job was as research assistant-- then speech writer and eventually chief of staff-- for Heritage founder Ed Feulner, who stepped down as president in April. (Full disclosure: I worked for Mr. Feulner from 1983-88.) Mr. Needham's new boss at Heritage is Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator whose former aides populate the staff of Sen. Cruz and other conservative groups and work closely with Mr. Needham.

Mr. Feulner was famous for preaching that "in the war of ideas there is no room for pacifists," and Mr. Needham has taken those words to heart. To his admirers, he has pushed the Republicans to show backbone and stand up for principle. His detractors, many of them inside the party, denounce him as everything from cocky to a GOP wrecking ball.

Several sources I have interviewed inside and outside of Heritage have complained of late that Mr. Needham's $7 million lobbying shop has become the tail that wags the $75 million think tank. "I hope that's not true," he responds. He says Heritage Action amplifies the message of Heritage scholars.

These pages have disagreed with the shutdown strategy, though certainly not the goal to end ObamaCare, so I press him on whether this high-risk strategy has really been worth it. Here he becomes slightly defensive.

"Look, ObamaCare is going to be the end of the American free-enterprise health-care system. We needed a plan to stop it. And if anybody has a plan other than what we're proposing, let's discuss it," Mr. Needham says, adding that his is the only game in town.

He says the path to victory now is for the House to keep passing bills to open up popular agencies of government, such as the national parks, the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Affairs: "I don't think that the Senate can keep refusing to open up these agencies as the shutdown drags on and on and on."

Mr. Needham thinks, by the way, that the stalemate may drag on well beyond Oct. 17, the day the U.S. Treasury may reach the federal borrowing limit. He has little problem with the latest strategy to pass a temporary debt-ceiling extension, viewing the debt-default debate as a distraction from the battle over the future of ObamaCare funding.

President Obama is the one in an "untenable position," Mr. Needham says. It is "totally unfair to say, 'We're going to give a delay of the employer mandate, but we will not give that same delay to the individual mandate, and we're going to exempt members of Congress.' A united conservative party making the case, day in and day out, about the fundamental unfairness of the way the president is implementing this law is a winning argument," he says. And it "inspires people and gets them on our side."

< …The concern of many Republicans, including strategist Karl Rove, is that Heritage Action's take-no-prisoners approach is hurting the party. The latest Gallup poll shows the GOP is viewed favorably by only 28% of Americans, down 10 points since September.

Mr. Needham blames the GOP for not focusing enough on ObamaCare, adding that "there is nothing in my mission statement that says anything about the Republican Party. Our mission is to advance the conservative agenda. We are nonpartisan and we really mean it." He's confident that Republicans will do fine in the 2014 elections if they stand firm in the fight, and he blames Mr. Rove and others for criticizing Ted Cruz.

So what is the endgame-- is there any exit strategy short of Mr. Obama rolling over? Mr. Needham admits that ObamaCare will never be repealed as long as Mr. Obama is president, but he still thinks it can be defunded or delayed: "Look, Democrats usually win these fights because they do a better job of not cracking. Obama says he will never blink and we believe him. They're very good at this. We're obviously very bad at it."

At some point, doesn't there have to be a compromise? That's the way the system works, after all. Yes, Mr. Needham agrees, "at some point in this fight somebody has to blink." His mission, he says, is to persuade "the House not to blink first."

Just as it was becoming clear-- through the release of a spate of new polls-- that the American people have overwhelmingly rejected Needham's and Cruz's radical right approach-- and that the Republican Party is in danger of losing independent voters in a way that could result in the loss of as many as 30 House seats (and control of that chamber), one of the most extremist and noisy gatherings of Republicans, the Values Voters Summit, met over the weekend and voted to back Cruz for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. With 42%, Cruz won the straw poll that the delusional, proto-fascist group held on Saturday. Sucking up Cruz's dust were a physician, Ben Carson, unknown outside of extreme right Hate Talk radio circle (13%), failed politician Rick Santorum (also 13%), Rand Paul (6%), and Marco Rubio (5%). I think Paul Ryan had a scattering of voters as well, but not enough to register on the radar. Last cycle at this time, the Values Voter crackpots had handed the nomination over to Hate Talk Radio host Mike Huckabee. Even before Cruz's straw poll victory, Dana Milbank was writing in the Washington Post about how the Cruzification of the GOP was leading the congressional party to doom. Rights who follow Cruz, like Colorado's Mike Coffman, are likely to lose their seats next year. Coffman says he doesn't care what his constituents tell the pollsters, he's doing what he thinks is right (using dangerous and extreme tactics to deny health insurance to millions of Americans).

Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration-- and the martyrdom-- they sought.

Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP.

At least so far, the standoff has been a political bloodbath for Republicans. And maybe that’s exactly what was needed to right the political system: The effort to gut Obamacare had to crash like this so that Republican leaders and lawmakers would find the courage to stand up to tea party toughs, and so that business leaders would decide to stop funding a small band of right-wing activists whose interests are antithetical to their own.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that Americans, by 53 percent to 31 percent, blame the Republican Party for the shutdown more than they do President Obama-- worse even than Republicans fared during the 1995-96 shutdown that also proved ruinous to their party.

The poll, confirming earlier results, found the Republican Party and the tea party had both reached all-time lows. Americans now favor a Democratic Congress to a Republican Congress by eight percentage points. And the percentage of Americans who think Obamacare is a good idea is up seven points from last month. Seventy percent say Republicans are putting politics ahead of the good of the country.

The small-but-vocal tea party had been seeking just such a confrontation since the 2010 election, and they opposed compromises by Republican leaders that postponed the showdown until now. Conservative groups that advocated for a standoff spoke openly about their motives. At a breakfast with reporters Wednesday, Michael Needham, chief executive of the conservative group Heritage Action, freely admitted that he was “pretty optimistic” that we will soon see a crackup of the old Republican order.

The lure of martyrdom has always been part of the tea party’s creed. In rally posters, online and in speeches, there are invocations of Thomas Jefferson’s quotation: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Perhaps now the tea party’s manure can be used to grow a healthier political system. There are encouraging signs that the shutdown has awakened the rest of the electorate to the outsize clout exercised by this minority.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who just nine months into the job led the shutdown strategy that has caused so many in his party to be Cruzified, has seen his reputation take a 16-point negative turn in the national Gallup poll since June. Cruz’s partner in the rebellion, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, has seen a 20-point negative swing in his home state over the same time period.

The shutdown and debt-limit standoff, by crushing consumer confidence and roiling markets, has brought home to business leaders the realization that they don’t have common cause with the tea party activists they’ve been supporting. My Post colleague Philip Rucker reported that Michigan businessman Brian Ellis is launching a Republican primary challenge to Rep. Justin Amash, a prominent tea party figure. Meantime, the New York Times reported last week about the possibility of “open warfare” between business and the tea party, noting that several trade associations are weighing the financing of primary campaigns against Republicans responsible for the shutdown.

Even the infamous Koch brothers, financiers of the tea party, are distancing themselves from the shutdown contretemps. Koch Industries announced this week that it “has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution to defunding Obamacare nor have we lobbied on legislative provisions defunding Obama­care.”

The Boston Globe recently reported that David Koch gave MIT $20 million for a child-care facility, because “I got a tear in my eye” hearing about researchers’ need for child care. Maybe the lachrymose Koch will weep for his country when he realizes the economic destruction caused by the groups he bankrolled.

As we've pointed out before, radical right Republicans in rural southern and Mormon districts with off-the-chart Republican PVIs-- Tea Party crackpots like Steve Stockman (R+25), Louie Gohmert (R+24), Jason Chaffetz (R+28), Steve Scalise (R+26), Randy Neugebauer (R+26), Tom Graves (R+26), Rob Bishop (R+27), Markwayne Mullin (R+20)-- have no worries. The majority of their constituents are victims of Hate Talk Rafio and they live on Planet Cruz. But it's the 40 or so Republicans in swing districts-- GOP incumbents dependent on independent voters to make common cause with Republicans-- who are freaking out over the Cruz/Needham extremism that is now dominating their party-- and dominating it in a way local voters disapprove… heavily.

Fred Upton, for example, has managed to thrive in a western Michigan swing district since 1987, despite Obama's victory there in 2008 and convincing wins for both Democratic senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin. Polling released by PPP last week, however, shows voters in MI-06 have had it with Upton playing footsie with the Tea Party radicals. If the election were held today, Democrat Paul Clements would beat Upton 51-38%. Clements has not been embraced by Upton-pal Steve Israel and Israel has ordered the DCCC to give Upton a pass. But the poll shows that if Clements has the money to make sure voters know that Upton voted for the government shut down, the margin of victory increases substantially and Clements would win 56-36%. Many of the most vulnerable Republicans aren't being engaged by the DCCC at Steve Israel's direct orders. Lee Rogers leads Buck McKeon in suburban L.A. 51-42% when voters are made aware McKeon backed the government shut down (up from a Rogers margin of victory of 46-44% as of right now), but, once again, Israel refuses to engage in this district. Ditto for Dave Reichert's district east of Seattle, where Jason Ritchie leads Reichert 49-42% today, a score that rises to 52-40% when voters are told that Reichert backed the government shut down.

In Miami-Dade, where Debbie Wasserman Schultz has persistently prevented any plausible Democrats from running against her buddy Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Obama won her district last year by a convincing 53-47%. PPP shows that a Democrat campaigning against Ros-Lehtinen who exposed her voters to shut down the government would beat her 53-42%. Another district that Steve Israel has taken off the table. There are lots of them-- in every part of the country, which is why we've been advocating that Pelosi fire him before its too late and replace him with someone who wants to take back the House (like Grayson or Ellison).

While Israel wastes money with his Blue Dog/New Dem candidates-- like anti-Choice, gay-hating, anti-minimum wage, coal-loving, NRA-backing corporate shill Jennifer Garrison in an R+8 district she will never win-- there are dozens of R+4, R+3, R+2 and even R+1 districts where vulnerable Republicans need independent voters to win and where Steve Israel is letting them off the hook. These districts-- winnable seats with no DCCC presence-- no recruiting and no help for grassroots candidates running:

R+4

• FL-07- John Mica
• MI-03- Justin Amash
• IL-16- Adam Kinzinger
• CA-49- Darrell Issa
• PA-16- Joe Pitts
• NJ-05- Scott Garrett
• IL-06- Peter Roskam
• MI-11- Kerry Bentivolio
• VA-04- Randy Forbes
• OH-10- Mike Turner

R+3

• WI-01- Paul Ryan
• CA-25- Buck McKeon
• NY-22- Richard Hanna

R+2

• VA-10- Frank Wolf
• WA-03- Jaime Herrera Beutler
• MI-08- Mike Rogers
• PA-15- Charlie Dent
• MN-02- John Kline
• PA-07- Pat Meehan
• PA-06- Jim Gerlach
• WI-07- Sean Duffy
• WI-08- Reid Ribble
• FL-27- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

R+1

• WA-08- Dave Reichert
• MI-06- Fred Upton
• NY-02- Peter King
• NJ-03- Jon Runyan

D+1

• NJ-02- Frank LoBiondo

Bolded districts are the ones where Obama won in 2008 and/or 2012. Meanwhile, well-meaning (and well-funded) but basically naive operations like Americans United For Change are all too eager to take their walking orders from the DCCC. This week, Americans United For Change started running a series of ads in the hopeless Steve Israel-sanctioned districts, like OH-06, and ignoring the districts we just spoke about above. Here's a complete waste of money on behalf of a quasi-"Democrat," Jennifer Garrison, who is no better than Republican incumbent Bill Johnson on a wide range of crucial issues. Americans United For Change did a half dozen like this one, mostly wasting their donors' money and probably unaware that they are helping to promote a candidate they-- and their donors-- would recoil from with horror.