Tone-deaf, dead-enders who want to undermine Chairman Steele may introduce a resolution at this week's winter meeting of the RNC in Hawaii designed to create rigid markers to determine who is and who is not a Republican. Minnesota's delegation to the RNC are holdovers from another time and will be turned out--with thanks for their service--in 2011. They also support this sort of party suicide. There is no need for such a resolution and the motion at the RPM state central meeting in December by Evie Axdahl supporting such was misguided if not dishonest. It passed because the delegates weren't aware of the back story and rightly were disgusted by Dede Scozzafava in New York's 23rd race. There was no time for opponents who were in the know to explain the maneuver in detail. A purity or litmus test is not only foolish but positively damaging. Kay Bailey Hutchinson is pro-choice. Any wingnut care to call for her ouster?The Wall Street Journal rightly says: "Litmus tests are for minority parties." We can't improve on this nor anything else they wrote on the issue. Click on the title of this post to read it.
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What kind of litmus test requires only an 80% score to pass, and then only grants to those who pass the right to use other people's money to get elected? Isn't the biggest complaint about the Republican Party that it tends to support candidates who aren't as conservative as the grassroots? Why, then, should there be some complaint when there is a guideline proposed for the Party to choose which candidates are sufficiently conservative to justify spending the money contributed by the conservative grass-roots on a particular candidate? Mind you, all that happens if some candidate gets endorsed by the local party but fails the test is that the RNC would not be contributing national party funds to their election effort. As it is now, the national party is even interfering with local party endorsement in primary contests, and most notably on behalf of just such candidates as would be precluded from such support under this test. For example, the RNC would never have supported Dede Scozzafava. She could have still been endorsed by the local party and run as a Republican, but she and the local party would have had to do their own fund-raising and campaigning; money from Minnesota conservatives would not have gone to helping her. What's wrong with that?
Now if you want to quibble with the particular 10 points of this resolution, or even more reasonably with the particular language of any of those points, I would have no problem with correcting any of those deficiencies, of which I believe there are several. But to suggest that the whole idea of having standards for how the limited resources of the Republican grassroots get distributed among various Republican candidates is just fiscally irresponsible. And to suggest that such is true because of who proposed it borders on Left-think. Brian Sullivan, for example, was the rising star of grassroots conservatives eight years ago when he challenged Tim Pawlenty for the gubernatorial endorsement. Now he is suddenly a "holdover"that needs to be "turned out"? I doubt he has changed his conservative credentials in such a short time, so what can he possibly have done?
Just out of curiousity, how conservative would a candidate =in another district= need to be, on a scale of 1 to 10, before YOU, personally, would support that candidate? How conservative do you think they would need to be before you think /I/ should financially support that candidate?
J. Ewing
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