Great column on salon.com about how the Republican Party's position on government changes when faced with a disaster. More importantly, the article points out how the party has changed today:
"...the true believers who make up today’s GOP base probably are more sympathetic to [Texas Congressman Ron] Paul’s claim that "we just don’t have the money" for federal disaster relief than they are to [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie’s statement that "your No. 1 goal as governor in a situation like this is the saving of human life -- and everything else is secondary."
This underscores a serious political problem for the Obama-era Republican Party. It used to be that GOP elected officials had some wiggle room when it came to balancing the demands of their base with the imperatives of keeping the broader public happy. This was important because the general public has some very mixed feelings when it comes to the role of government. While conservative rhetoric about government being bloated, wasteful, inefficient and unnecessary is quite popular, so are most big ticket government programs and services. Republicans have learned this in the past when they’ve bent too far toward pleasing their base -- think of Newt Gingrich’s attack on Medicare in 1995 or George W. Bush's planned Social Security overhaul in 2005.
But the wiggle room is basically gone, and today’s GOP base demands absolute ideological purity from its leaders. It’s no longer enough for them to campaign on generic anti-government rhetoric."
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