John did a nice job of featuring the new Matt Taibbi piece on plastics salesman–turned–congressman John Boehner in the January 20, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The bulk of the article focuses on Boehner’s monumental hackery — the subhead is “The new speaker is a lazy, double-talking shill for corporate interests. So how’s he going to fare with the Tea Party?”

But I’d like to focus on second aspect of the article, the effect of the Teaparty crowd on “Bush Republicans” (Taibbi’s phrase). Seems there’s a rather effective Teabag leader in Boehner’s home district, a man named Chris Littleton. Taibbi (emphasis mine):

Boehner’s irrepressible hackosity is a serious problem for the Republican establishment, which desperately needs a more convincing con man to stave off voter anger on the right. In this regard, the contrast between Boehner and Littleton, the Tea Party leader in Boehner’s home state, is interesting. The two men live in the same place, the small township of West Chester near Cincinnati, so Littleton is very familiar with Boehner. But Littleton’s opinion of the Republican establishment couldn’t be lower: It was precisely programs like the Medicare drug benefit bill and No Child Left Behind, programs he considers unacceptably wasteful and intrusive, that moved him to get into politics. “These were all Republican programs,” Littleton says. “If you look at Republican congressmen from Ohio, they all voted for this stuff.” What’s interesting is that the survival of the hack political class that Boehner represents now depends almost entirely on their ability to neutralize grass-roots leaders like Littleton — and the word “leader” here is used in the real sense of the word. While Boehner often negotiates for a Republican delegation that winds up rejecting the compromises he reaches, Littleton, when I speak with him, strikes me in exactly the opposite way — I feel very aware that I am talking to someone with a lot of political power, who represents quite a lot of actual human beings. For obvious reasons, this is a real problem for the Republican Party establishment, which would forfeit any ability to squeeze the Goldmans and Citigroups of the world for golf vacations the instant they stop being able to deliver the votes for cushy spending bills and deregulatory goodies — votes that are now, at least in part, controlled by people like Littleton. This is why in some states the Republican Party fought so fiercely against the Tea Party; in Ohio, the party spent nearly $1 million campaigning to stop Tea Party candidates from assuming jobs at the state level. “They hate us more than they hate the left,” says Littleton. “The left’s just an enemy. We present a legitimate threat to them.”

There’s no reason that a determined group of leaders on the left can’t do exactly what the principled (if dangerously wrong-headed) Teabag leaders like Littleton are doing on the right.

But progressives can’t be lazy or complacent; and defeatism is their friend, not ours. We’re not that far away; the organizers are emerging.

And note elsewhere in the article that the principled leaders like Littleton are steering clear of the corp giveways, junkets, and what Taibbi might easily label “spotlight-fueled stroke-fests” (Taibbi’s milder phrase is being “dazzled by their new status in Congress”; he applies his strokes elsewhere). For example, Littleton is smart enough to see through FreedomWorks: “We’re here in trench warfare, and they’re on a book tour.” And that refusal to be bought doesn’t diminish his effectiveness, or doom him to the rough parts of the fairway.

The lesson — We don’t need money as a pre-condition, just leadership and determination. Lord knows that leftie anger is out there, just waiting for a fire to boil the pot over.

In that sense, we should look at Yes We Can as less a betrayal than unfinished business, a movement looking for a more reliable front man. Offered for your consideration.

GP