Steinglass spells out Ted Cruz’s strategy:
First, you identify a demon, and spend a few years whipping up a hysterical frenzy over the threat it poses. You want to tie it to a few key words that you can repeat in a derogatory, contemptuous tone of voice, over and over, until the very signifier evokes such a feeling of loathing in your audience that anyone associated with it is contaminated. Let’s call it Thing X. Now, most people will think your goal here is to drum up a successful campaign against Thing X and against your opponents, who support it, but this is at most part of the mission. Thing X itself may or may not be terribly important, and your opponents are your opponents; there’s not much you can do about them. What is crucial here, though, is that once you’ve firmly established your followers’ revulsion towards Thing X, you can use it to annihilate your “allies”—also known as “rivals”—by accusing them of insufficient vigilance against Thing X.
Beutler contends that six months from now “the right’s anti-Obamacare single-mindedness could easily become a real liability” in the next election:
Republicans are setting themselves up to tumble into a discontinuity of their own creation. The surge of anti-Obamacare legislative antics has created a feedback loop between Republicans and GOP base voters, where each vote increases the right’s insistence on defeating the law, which in turn creates more pressure on Republicans to take radical steps to defund or delay or repeal it. But unless they plan on trying to take away people’s insurance in an election year, they’ll have to dial back their extreme anti-Obamacare procedural tactics at the moment that the right’s insistence on keeping up the fight is most pitched.
It might look right now like Obamacare will dominate the politics of 2014, but I think that’s a premature judgment. At least some Republicans will feel pressure to change their views about the law — or at least their view that it should be repealed — next year. Certainly after primary season is behind them. That’ll be an awkward turn for them to take.
The Dish 