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There was this effort by the Tea Party, essentially, to put a gun to the head of the government
and of the global economy, if you really think about it and it failed. It didn't fail a little
bit, they were utterly defeated. So, even Ted Cruz had to admit complete defeat.
Do you think anyone took it seriously though? Well, bu this is what they stand for you have
to remember that, what they were demanding if Obama had lost the election would have
taken place. Obamacare would have been immediately repealed on the first day of the Romney presidency
and then they would have continued going to budget cuts that make today's cuts look very
mild by comparison, cut by 10 fold what are being talked about today. If you look at the
Ryan Plan, which would have become law, had Romney and Ryan have been elected, it was
a sharp shift to the right, it was the rewriting of the social contract and the things we'd
done under Franklin Roosevelt, there would have been change and they had the votes to
do this had Romney won. But the President's troubles since, do you
think.. This isn't about, when I say The Center Holds,
my daughter gave me the title, it comes from the William Butler Yates poem, 'things fall
apart, the center cannot hold' so I wasn't talking about, like winning and this little
battle or, you know, do people like him over Syria, anything like this, it's about the
big tectonic plates of American politics and in 2012 it was all on the line and there would
have been a very sharp move to the right, the country would have become much more like
Texas, really is the bottom line. The whole country, and now Texas is an outlier. American
is not Texas and it's not going to be Texas any time soon.
Do you think the stakes and the fights over the last few months, we're talking about the
government shutdown obviously but the broader Tea Party versus idea, were the stakes as
great over the last couple of months as they were during the election, I guess that's my
point, that it feels like the election was a big thing relatively speaking, this thing
feels like it was never serious. Absolutely.
More like Cleavon Little with a gun to his head in Blazing Saddles.
That's really funny, no that's why The Center Holds refers to the election. That's when,
once the election took place then Obamacare was a done deal. They could repeal in the
House another hundred times and it wouldn't make any difference, there were never the
votes in the Senate and the president has the veto pen so, the conservatives can't actually
get anything done. They can block things and so the question now is how much they block,
but that can be around the center, median strip of American politics and Obama's not
on the left, he's in the center. People on the left will be happy to tell you
Obama's in the center, not on the left. Right. So there was a struggle between the
center and the far right and the center won. Clearly in that respect the center won.
So, sometimes liberals, you know, oh I'm so depressed, oh the Tea Party...they should
thank their lucky stars about the results of the 2012 election.