Rep. Peter King Positions Himself As Anti-Tea-Party Republican

What our good friends at HuffPo aren’t saying is that Peter King is looking as if he intends to throw his hat into the ring for the 2016 GOP presidential candidate race. He is banking on a backlash within the GOP against the Tea Party faction, and has stepped up his criticism of the hard right wing of his own party:

Rep. Peter King wants even the Boy Scouts to know he’s upset with his Republican Party.

Before a dozen members of Pack 690 from nearby Seaford, N.Y., the longtime Republican congressman declares that the partial government shutdown triggered partly by the demands of the GOP’s right flank “didn’t accomplish anything.” “We’re back where we started from, except we lost $24 billion out of the economy,” King says with a hint of disgust in his Long Island office.

While some Republicans applaud the hard-line tactics, King is among the waning Republican moderates in Congress who don’t miss an opportunity to distance themselves from the government shutdown — and the conservative minority King blames for leading the Republican Party into “the valley of death.”

His message is aggressive and consistent whether addressing Scouts or a national audience on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” And his eagerness to buck his party reflects his no-nonsense style as much as the realities of being a Republican congressman in a moderate New York district that President Barack Obama won twice.

Uncompromising conservative ideology might play well in other places, but not across the Northeast, where the Republican Party is fighting for survival.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.