ObamaCare Referral Failure: Conservative Pragmatism Beats Tea Party Shouting

I confess: I want to gloat over the Tea Party's failure to gather enough signatures to refer Senate Bills 38 and 43 to a public vote, especially when contrasted with the South Dakota Dems' successful submission of nearly 23,000 signatures to refer Governor Daugaard's corporate welfare bill.

But such gloating is inappropriate. For starters, it's bad form. It also tempts fate: the moment I break out the hard neener-neener on the dejected Tea Partiers, I'll get an e-mail from Pat Powers saying his boss has thrown out my signatures and 7,000 others.

Most importantly, gloating that "The Tea Party has failed!" would be inaccurate. I return to the critique I maintained throughout the first year that this political appellation returned to common discourse: there is no such thing as a "Tea Party." There is no unified movement or organization. There is no coherent Teabagger philosophy or policy portfolio. There's just mostly shouting and a bunch of angry people who can't fully articulate what they're really mad about, let alone accurately explain the laws that a few of them tried to refer.

Even if you grant the existence of some amorphous segment of the South Dakota electorate that may generally be called a "Tea Party," this Kevin Woster article from April reminds us that the failed referral drive was not a failure of that "Tea Party" but only of one self-identified splinter thereof. Citizens for Liberty wanted to use the referral to bang the drum about "ObamaCare" during the 2012 election. Rival rousèd rabble Tea Party Alliance opposed the referral drive for pragmatic reasons:

[TPA talker and frequent conservative lobbyist Zach] Lautenschlager argued that it would be better to spend money on political campaigns in individual state legislative districts to defeat those who supported SB38 and SB43 and opposed versions of the South Dakota Health Care Freedom Act that were rejected by legislators in 2010 and 2011.

The South Dakota Health Care Freedom Act was aimed at nullifying the Obama reform law in South Dakota. Lautenschlager argues that winning legislative districts for supporters of the Health Care Freedom Act could pay off in the future much more than a petition drive against Daugaard's bills.

It could cost $250,000 to $500,000 for a statewide campaign with dubious chances of victory, he said. And if the effort failed, state legislators would use that loss as a mandate from the public in support of the Obama plan and opposed to health care freedom, Lautenschlager said.

Money would be better spent on legislative races in 2012, he said.

"If we were using half a million to influence the legislature, that would be an incredible sea change," Lautenschlager said [Kevin Woster, "Tea Party Groups Clash over How to Fight Obama Health Plan," Rapid City Journal, 2011.04.20].

I can see Zach's point. $500,000 could give ten Russell Olsons some serious electoral heartburn. One could argue that the failure of Citizens for Liberty to deliver any petitions yesterday is actually a victory for practical heads in the "Tea Party." A word of caution, though, Zach: if you and Allen Unruh and other wing nuts really can raise $500,000, only to waste it on paying state legislative candidates to spend 2012 screaming about "ObamaCare," I will gloat. Bleating about irrelevant national issues that you can't change in Pierre while ignoring practical state policy does not win South Dakota elections (see also: Jason Bjorklund, District 8, 2010).

Barb Lindberg would respond that referring SB 38 and 43 would have provided tea-flavored candidates a common policy framework around which to frame their arguments. The South Dakota Dems certainly took that route, seeing some collateral benefit to legislative candidates in referring a controversial gubernatorial plan to highlight the Republican Party's prioritization of corporate welfare over kindergartners.

Yet even there, Zach's pragmatism may win out. For Dems, referring HB 1230 hits all the right notes: challenge the governor, challenge Republicans on crony capitalism, champion support for education, and all without calling in Gerry Lange to advocate an income tax. For Tea Partiers, referring SB 38 and 43 puts them at odds with conservative Governor Daugaard and complicates messaging for all the mainline Republicans who voted for those bills. Believe me, South Dakota Republicans would much rather spend 2012 talking about what meatheads we Democrats are, not explaining why they enacted state laws in compliance with the federal health care law that South Dakota is suing to overturn as unconstitutional.

So I can't accurately say that the South Dakota "Tea Party" has failed. Their own self-described members simply had a disagreement over electoral tactics. In this case, pragmatism beat hollering.