Saturday, May 02, 2009
Getting "Real" With The GOP
Surrounding Obama's 100th day, the bottom appeared to fall out of the Republican Party over the last 10 days: It lost a special election -- and a senator -- and saw the RNC get into a civil war between its members and chairman while elected officials created their own "alternate" party structure. Paging Mark "Survivor" Burnett and Simon "American Idol" Cowell)!
We may have your new reality TV smash!
Forget Rod Blagojevich! -- he's basically a one-trick pony (based on the hair -- one of the Shetland variety at that). The real action is in the Republican side of the ledger.
This week, one liberal Republican senator jumped to the Democrats, starting an internecine party battle over whether moderates should be welcomed, tolerated or expunged; a liberal Republican Supreme Court Justice retired (at 69, relatively young for high court justices) allowing a Democratic president to replace him;Republican National Committee members launched a procedural move to restrain their own recently elected party chairman from making decisions on how to spend the party money; that chairman blamed any possible money problems at the committee on his predecessor; and a former GOP speaker of the House mocked those members as "precious" spoiled individuals.
And that doesn't even touch on the family part of it: While Meghan McCain got into a Twitter fight with Karl Rove (just writing that shows how insane this has gotten), daddy John McCain signed onto a new GOP group designed to "rebrand the party" (which will undoubtedly raise money that might otherwise go to the RNC -- wonderful)! Making things even more interesting is that one of the members of this National Council For A New America is Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour -- himself a former RNC Chairman.
Notably, neither Newt Gingrich nor Michael Steele were invited to be part of this new NCNA organization..
So, already it looks like some form of "Survivor"-like alliance has been created within the GOP structure, so a talking-head C-SPAN type-show would be awful. Instead, it should be a vote-off, like "Survivor" or "American Idol." Either have a Tribal Council (perhaps made up of folks like Grover Norquist orthe Club For Growth -- who took credit for driving Specter out of the party) or a panel of judges (including Robert Bork, who Specter famously helped vote down two decades ago) who decide who stays, who goes, and who gets electoral "immunity."
It's got hit written all over it. Spike TV, perhaps? Or, appropriately enough -- the USA Network!
Alas, Peggy Noonan insists on being all responsible and serious abut the collapse of the GOP. Sorry, Peggy, I think maturity went out the window sometime ago.
Labels: Destruction of the GOP, Republican National Committee, Republican Party
Monday, March 23, 2009
Party Flip-Flop
- Holding the White House for the first time in eight years;
- Having won the presidency with more than 50 percent of the vote for the first time in 32 years.
- The other party forcefully repudiated in consecutive elections.
One also has to ask "What the hell did the DNC do during the biggest, boldest, most expensive Inauguration of all time!!????? Did Obama's people take all the Inaugural money for themselves???? For just the Inaugural Committee??? Did the DNC not have a semi-[inaugural-related] Gala???? How could that be?? [Based on Republican post-inaugural experience,] follow-up calls and chasing checks goes on for weeks after events. There should have been some spillover from the Inaugural deposited into February [accounts]. Another thought is that now that Hillary Clinton is at State Dept. where are the Clinton Rolodex of donors going?? Clearly, they are not being contacted by the DNC yet. A third thought: The DNC has safeguards on taking illegal online donations that the Obama campaign did not. It will be interesting to see if that changes after this disgraceful first month of fundraising.Of those notions, the last is the most intriguing. Beyond possible problems with Tim Kaine, would future months with measly results create renewed media speculation on the clarity (i.e. legality) of the Obama campaign's donation track record.
Labels: Democratic National Committee, DNC, Michael Steele, Republican National Committee, RNC, Tim Kaine
