Eleventy Chess Moves

What I really want on Tuesday is a massive defeat for the crazy GOP candidates, simply to prove the smug pundits and the incessant pollsters wrong. I want the conventional narrative and its inherent assumptions to be so discredited that it forces a wholesale change in the news cycle dynamic. Not holding my breath.

Frank Rich posts an op-ed today that looks at how the GOP played the Tea Party to set up the trajectory of this election. But he opens with a point that has been rankling in the back of my mind for a while. A Tea Party win/GOP takeover isn't the worst thing that could happen in terms of 2012 for Obama's prospects.

Frank's closer predicts the future:

But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.

Not sure about the showdown, but while a GOP takeover will be a disaster for marginally solvent Americans, for our well off polictical class, it could be a big win in the long run for the Dems. It would disarm one of the Republican's most powerful rhetorical weapons -- that the party "in power" takes the blame for the mess. If you're playing eleventy chess, it's probably a brilliant move to let the other guy win this one game in the series.