New playbook

The savvy candidate knows how to play.

Nobody — not even your typical Democrat — gets elected to office by promising massive new budget-busting spending programs or huge tax increases. Instead, the trick is to tell voters — especially the vital independent voters — what they like to hear, sprinkling your campaign rhetoric with homages to “fiscal responsibility” a “fair tax structure” and perhaps even “personal responsibility.”

Once safely ensconced in the warm cocoon of incumbency, however, who could possibly expect you to follow through? Politics has no place for brash ideologues. To get invited to the proper Georgetown cocktail parties, you cozy up to the glad-handers and lobbyists, going along to get along.

It’s always been that way.

Today, however, it appears this new breed of “tea party” Republican has found a different playbook — which has the powers that be in Washington watching nervously.

In assessing the House GOP’s $1.2 trillion spending bill, which includes more than $60 billion in proposed real cuts, Philip Rucker of The Washington Post noted that not only did the Republicans go after plenty of programs Democrats traditionally embrace, they even singled out spending Republicans tend to advocate.

“House Republicans also ran the budgetary buzz saw through costly defense and homeland security programs that their party had historically protected,” he wrote, including farm subsidies. “They left no sacred cows.”

In other words, these guys might actually mean what they said on the hustings. Their drive to impose fiscal sanity on Washington goes beyond a cynical partisan desire to usurp power. It might actually have something to do with … values and principles!

Said freshman Rep. Steven Southerland, a Florida Republican: “You know, we talk about draconian (budget) measures … but draconian is leaving our children with debt that smothers them.”

Amen.