The Tail That Wags The Dog

[bartlebyslament]

Inglis found that ideological extremism is not only the realm of the tea party; it also has infected the official circles of his Republican Party. In early 2009, he attended a meeting of the GOP's Greenville County executive committee. At the time, Republicans were feeling discouraged. Obama was in the White House; the Democrats had enlarged their majorities in the House and Senate. The GOP seemed to be in tatters. But Inglis had what he considered good news. He put up a slide he had first seen at a GOP retreat. It was based on exit polling conducted during the November 2008 election. The slide, according to Inglis, showed that when American voters were asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum—1 being liberal, 10 being conservative—the average ended up at about 5.6. The voters placed House Republicans at about 6.5 and House Democrats at about 4.3. Inglis told his fellow Republicans, "This is great news," explaining it meant that the GOP was still closer to the American public than the Democrats. The key, he said, was for the party to keep to the right, without driving off the road.

Inglis was met, he says with "stony" faces: "There's a short story by Shirley Jackson, 'The Lottery.'" The tale describes a town where the residents stone a neighbor who is chosen randomly. "That's what the crowd looked like. I got home that night and said to my wife, 'You can't believe how they looked back at me.' It was really frightening." The next speaker, he recalls, said, "'On Bob's ideological spectrum up there, I'm a 10,' and the crowd went wild.

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Though, to be more accurate, the modern day Republican party has become less the tail that wags the dog than the tail that turns into a boa constrictor and has currently coiled itself around the dog, slowly squeezing the life out of it.

Rep Bob Inglis is one of the early casualties of the Tea Party movement, losing to Trey Gowdy in the republican run-offs. In the late 1990s he pursued Bill Clinton's impeachment with all the zeal a Republican could muster. He recalls

"I hated Bill Clinton. I wanted to destroy him. Then I had six years out [after leaving Congress in 1999] to look back on that, and now I would confess it as a sin. It is just wrong to want to destroy another human being and to spend so much time and effort trying to destroy Bill Clinton—some of it with really suspect information [...] So in the six years I was out, I looked back and realized, "Oh what a waste."
 

All in all, it seems as if he's definitely cooled down a bit now, since he has been attacked for opposing the surge in Iraq, urging Joe "You lie!" Wilson to apologize, and supporting clean energy -- saying that it's a simple fact of "biblical law: you cannot do on your property what harms your neighbor's property."

This has not made him many friends. I don't know if it's because he's now out of a job and free to speak his mind, or if he would've done this despite Republican leadership, but this is a fascinating interview with Rep Bob Inglis, who recalls his last few months in a system that has slowly begun to devour itself.

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