Mr. Friedman points out that moderate Republicans need to stop blaming the President and take charge of their own party; that only if they stand up to Ted Cruz and his Tea Party hardliners will our country be able to move forward.
Any underlines are mine."There is one group of people with an even greater interest than Democrats in President Obama prevailing over Tea Party Republicans in this shutdown showdown, and that is mainstream Republicans....
...If the 'Ted Cruz Wing' of the G.O.P. prevails and forces the president to curtail Obamacare in anyway in return for funding the government, mainstream conservatives will be looking at a terrible future. In the near term, they'll be taking orders from Senator Ted Cruz...
...In the long run, because this fringe would be dictating the party line, Republicans would stand zero chance of winning the White House in 2016. If the country rejected Mitt Romney's bad imitation of far-right conservative--one hostile to immigration reform, health care, gay marriage and a grand bargain--imagine how the real thing would fare...
...The only thing standing between mainstream Republicans and a hellish future of kowtowing to Ted Cruz...is President Obama's refusal to give in to the shutdown blackmail that Cruz & Co. have cooked up. The more pragmatic Republicans, who know that this is a disaster for their party but won't confront Cruz & Co., have settled on this bogus line: 'Well, sure, maybe Cruz and the Tea Party went too far, but it's still President Obama's fault. He's president. He should negotiate with them. He needs to lead.'
President Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail, because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted--and, if legally challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor--the majority decision holds sway. A minority of the minority, which has lost every democratic means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if its demands are not met...
The president has said that he would give the G.O.P. an agenda for negotiations that could start when the government is funded and the debt ceiling lifted...What Obama will not do, and must not do, is pay an entry fee to that negotiation--say giving up the medical-device tax--just to help Boehner down from the tree...
The reason so many mainstream Republican lawmakers want Obama to give something to Cruz & Co. is that they want to get out of this mess, but they're all afraid to stand up to the far-right fringe themselves--with its bullying network of barking talk-show hosts and moneymen. But Obama shouldn't take them off the hook. Only Republicans can delegitimize the nihilistic madness at the base of their party...
...American needs a proper right-of-center conservative party to challenge a left-of-center Democratic Party. Without a healthy opposition party--one that is ready to win some and lose some and learn from its losses, one that has a real agenda for upward mobility, not just a low-tax obsession and boiling anger--our two-party system doesn't work, and neither does the country."
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