It’s starting to become a trend in the 2012 Republican primaries – the vote may be days away, but the outcome (seems) to have already been decided.  Much like SITD did for the Granite State,  let’s take a look at Saturday’s Coming Attractions for the Palmetto State.

• Romp-ney:  He won’t win by New Hampshire-styled margins, but Mitt Romney isn’t going to win by an Iowaesque 8 votes either.  The Real Clear Politics average shows Romney with a healthy 10% lead and the only candidate in the field trending up (Gingrich, Santorum & Paul have all flatlined in recent days).  Nor does there seem to be much of a battle for second place.  Gingrich has held steady around the low 20s and will more than likely hold off Paul who despite polling in the mid teens, admittedly has less organization in SC than in Iowa or New Hampshire.  Everyone appears to be waiting for a shoe to drop to change the dynamic of the campaign…and two events this week have perhaps the last best chance of doing it…
• He Turned Her Into a Newt!:  Sarah Palin’s quasi-endorsement of Gingrich’s SC upset bid was the best news the former Speaker has had in weeks.  But despite the South Carolina-qualified nature of her “endorsement”, Palin’s comments might have a better influence on Gingrich’s candidacy down the road as he attempts to coalesce conservatives and define himself as the race’s sole “anti-Romney.”  With Santorum’s numbers stalling in SC (and elsewhere), a reasonably close second place finish for Gingrich might not entirely clear the field but could likely change the narrative from conservatives needing to rally around Rick (even if we now know he actually finished ahead of Newt in NH).  Good thing for Gingrich that Santorum didn’t have his own major endorse…oh wait…
• Divine Intervention:  While Gingrich has been attempting to rally conservatives to his cause, Santorum was making headway in rallying social conservative support with the endorsement of 114 evangelical leaders in a lopsided vote.  Even better for Santorum, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson ignited controversy over Newt’s social values with his comment that Callista Gingrich had been Newt’s “mistress” for eight years.  Unfortunately, Rick may need an Act of God to finish higher than fourth in SC, have squandered his Iowa showing by trying to win, place or show in New Hampshire.  Like Gingrich, Santorum’s 11th hour endorsement might play better post SC, but unlike Gingrich, Santorum doesn’t look likely to have much momentum after Saturday.
• Little Mr. Sunshine State:  Will South Carolina’s outcome even matter if Romney wins as expected?  Romney leads in Florida, the next state in the primary calendar, by 26%.  That number isn’t likely to get worse in light of a South Carolina win, meaning Romney might enter Feb not only undefeated but by winning by margins that would make him the nominee if the system was designed by the BCS.
• Perry-kiri:  Ah, the obligatory Rick Perry comment.  Despite having performed political seppuku on his candidacy months ago (and confirmed by his 10%, $4 million Iowa showing), Perry has soldiered on.  There are three reasons for Perry’s decline: high expectations, poor debate/stump speech performance and….oh crap…uh….uh…the EPA?  Perry’s running third in Texas polling now, which should pretty much say everything that’s left to say about the one-time GOP front-runner.
• Raising Cain:  Well, he promised an endorsement by January 19th.  And he delivered…kinda.  Herman Cain is endorsing his own bid on the South Carolina ballot, aided by “comedian” Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC.  Cain will be on Colbert’s conservative-bash-a-thon TV show and Colbert will supposedly “rally” for Cain, trying to drive independents and Democrats to the polls.  Cain says critics of the move should “lighten up.”  Cain’s political influence certainly has.

The patient may be still wiggling on the table, but it’s never too early for a “pre-mortem” on the GOP New Hampshire primary.  [UPDATED BELOW]

• Margin Call:  With even the Suffolk daily tracking poll showing Romney’s numbers rebounding despite a week of attacks, the question isn’t whether Romney will win but by how much.  Perhaps the only margin worth watching is to see where Gov. Jon Huntsman finishes.  Short of a close second, it’s hard to see how Huntsman justifies going forward unless he believes Florida can be his bulwark.

• Rick-Rolled:  Rick Santorum is desperately trying to become 2012’s Mike Huckabee, right down to repeating the 2008 candidates’ mistakes.  Following his Iowa victory four years ago, Huckabee chose to contest New Hampshire and Michigan instead of turning to South Carolina and arguably friendly political territory.  Huckabee seemed temporarily vindicated by rising up from single digits to finish in third, winning a handful of delegates and lingering momentum.  Instead, the time and treasure spent elsewhere helped cost him South Carolina and the mantle as the sole “anti-McCain.”  Santorum might finish fourth or fifth tonight – and probably would have even if he hadn’t campaigned in the Granite State for the past week.

• Bain & Conservatism’s Dark Night: No, we’re not talking about the next Batman film, but some of the comments from the field this week over Romney and his history with Bain Capital do seem Two-Faced.  Romney’s “I love being able to fire people” is likely to end up in a general election ad should he win the nomination, but did the rest of the GOP field need to beat the Democrats to the punch?  Romney’s comment certainly shows a tin-ear, even if he clarified his stance within the next few sentences.  Yet nearly every Republican candidate has decided not only to take a swing at Romney on the issue but poke capitalism as well.  A pro-Gingrich Super PAC is planning a $3 million-plus ad campaign in South Carolina lambasting Romney’s Bain record as well.  As NRO’s Jim Geraghty muses, “the demonization of the free market is complete.”

• “Anti” Gravity:  While the battle to become the “anti-Romney” seemed more like a poor man’s episode of “Survivor” earlier in the campaign as candidate after candidate was eliminated from the race, the remaining Anybody But Romneys now look to be in an electoral game of chicken.  Paul, Gingrich, Santorum, Perry and Huntsman have all taken their measure of the field and (fairly correctly) determined that none of the remaining candidates have the organization, financing, or momentum to displace the front-runner.  But the hour for someone to coalesce the anti-Romney vote is growing late and despite all the talk of the gravity of nominating Romney, none of the pretenders has yet signaled a willingness to move their support to another.  Thus the rest of the field waits for someone else to drop out in increasingly vain hopes that the last man standing can inherit the cumulative frustrations of the base.

• Days & Weaks Ahead:  Playing upon the last note, it’s hard to see where the anti-Romney forces can possibly stage a comeback given the upcoming primary calendar.  Romney holds solid polling leads in South Carolina and Florida and looks likely to enter February having won every caucus/primary.  But Feb 7th could be the date that sees Romney lose – twice.  Colorado and Minnesota hold their caucuses that night and if the field has narrowed down to one or two major competitors, the evening could contain the first electoral chink in Romney’s armor.  The only problem with that theory?  Neither state is actually pledging delegates to the convention – both votes are beauty contests and will likely be spun as such by Romney should he lose.

Was George H. W. Bush a charlatan?

I mean, he wasn’t a Reagan-style conservative; during the 1980 nomination drive, he aggressively attacked Reagan’s economic proposals, calilng them “voodoo economics”, proposing a much Sturdevant-friendlier, “moderate”, less-anti-Keynesian approach to the economy.

He was wrong, Reagan was right.

And Reagan made damn sure everyone knew it, comdemning the elder Bush’s anti-Austrian apostasy with a vigor that destroyed Bush’s career in the GOP…

…wait.  No.  That’s not right.  Reagan made his case gently and with good humor and – for better or worse – brought Bush into his inner circle and reached out to his supporters and, most importantly, convinced them he had the right idea.  He beat Bush and the moderate wing of the party with fact, with rhetoric, with a better plan (in a year when the country didn’t want just an incremental rejection of Jimmy Carter and stagflation), and with the understanding that your opponents in February need to be your staunch, solid allies in November.

Which is why I’m concerned with some of the Romney-bashing I’m seeing.

Over at LFR, Gary Gross tucked into Romney yesterday, in a piece called “What’s In A Word”, as he – who is, to be sure, to the right of Romney on the great conservative continuum – has been wont to do this cycle:

Wednesday night, Hannity interviewed Sarah Palin. Though he didn’t say it in this interview, Hannity has repeatedly said that Mitt’s a conservative. Shame on him for pulling his punches with Mitt. It’s intellectually reprehensible for him to criticize the mediaa for not digging into President Obama’s past, then do a half-assed job of scrutinizing Mitt.

Now, before I get overwhelmed with comments and email from the “Anyone But Romney” (ABR)  crowd – I’m with Gary so far.  Scrutinize away.  Pull like crazy for your candidate, Newt or Santorum or Perry or Paul or Huntsman or, I don’t know, Mitt, even.  Now’s the time to stand on principle and accept no substitutes.

Go for it!

Here’s where I gotta push back, though:

If the gutless media, Hannity included, did their jobs, charlatans like Mitt Romney wouldn’t gain traction in a GOP presidential campaign. At minimum, they wouldn’t be allowed to call themselves conservatives. They could mouth the words but they’d be ridiculed mercilessly.

And as Reagan would say, “there you again”.  Let’s address Gary’s question, “what’s in a word?” – in this case, “conservative”.

What’s a “Conservative?”  In America, the inconvenient truth is that it means three different things, and that’s just counting significant American political movements:

• Southern Conservatives:  They are largely evangelical, and focused heavily on social issues – abortion, euthanasia, gun control, gay marriage – and, oddly, frequently quite comfortable with big government (because the South needed lots of government help to rebuild itself from the 1870’s through the 1940’s).  Think Mike Huckabee, and Dubya and to some extent Rick Santorum (although it’s not a perfect description, and these definitions allow for significant overlap) The media have spent the past thirty years trying to make this synonymous with “conservative” in the media – largely because it’s easy and convenient (albeit largely mistaken unto the point of group slander) to play the race card here, and partly because its overt connection to fundamentalist Christianity makes it big John Stewart-fodder.
• Western Conservatives: Think everyone from Reagan through the Tea Party; heavily libertarian, pro-growth, the bastard child of Jefferson and Jackson in many ways.  
• Northeastern Conservatives:  Soft on social issues, comfortable with big government (because that’s what most of the Northeast has and has always had), but pro-business (in many varying degrees) and pro-law-and-order (which, again, means many different things.  Think Nelson Rockefeller, George H. W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Brett Schundler, Chris Christie (and Arne Carlson, maybe, and that’s being charitable) and the guest of honor in this post, Mitt Romney.  

It’s going to be a big show on the Northern Alliance Radio Network tomorrow.

For starters, we’ll have Mound city councilman Dave Osmek on, to talk about the story about light rail that you’re juuuust not hearing from the rah-rah mainstream media.

Then, we’ll be talking with newly-elected MNGOP chair Pat Shortridge about the way forward from the party’s mess, and – more importantly – how the MNGOP is going to capitalize on last year’s epic gains.

And there might be more.  Stay tuned!

Talk about timely.

On the Northern Alliance on Saturday, I’ll be interviewing the new chairman of the Republican Party of Minnesota, Pat Shortridge.

We will, naturally, be taking calls.  If you have questions of the new chair, by all means tune in and call in.

Disjointed random thoughts about Iowa:

• Let The Donnybrook Roll: I think the results last night were about the best possible outcome for the GOP as a whole.  All the talk of the nomination being a predetermined conclusion is on hold, at least for now (and hopefully for quite some time); whether you’re a western libertarian-conservative, an evangelical or a pro-business, law-and-order conservative, you have a dog on the race.  More importantly, all those dogs matter; the longer the social-con and libertarian dogs run even with Romney, the more he has to concede to them – us – to eke out the nomination.  And at the same time, Santorum is going to have to figure out how to appeal to activists and voters in New Hampshire, Florida and Utah (not his natural constituencies) as well as South Carolina.  The winner?  All of us who want a conservative who’s primed to kick Obama’s ass in November.
• Come Home, Michele:  You took your best shot.  And it was a very good shot – the first woman to get into the GOP caucuses, likely the first of many.  Maybe the first of several tries for you.  But it’s over now, and I think you know it (as this is written, rumors have it your next presser will be to bow out; we’ll see).  You need to come back to the Sixth District and win – I’m guessing 15 points this time – and use the mojo you’ve acquired over this campaign to move into leadership, and build that resume.  And, let’s not forget, work on that message discipline; as I’ve said, when you’re “on”, there’s scarcely a politician out there who can out-motivate you from the stump. On the other hand, there are times when you shoot yourself in the foot with a belt-fed M240G machine gun.  I’m not going to recount the times – the media and your various local obsessive stalkers will do that for us – but let’s call it a growth opportunity; the next time you get a communications director who knows what he or she is doing, take their counsel.

It’s long been the policy of this blog to never, ever endorse candidates.  Partly because it seems arrogant – I mean, who cares what I think?  And partly because even if I do have any influence over what people think about how they vote, I’d much prefer that that influence go to helping, in whatever way I can, to get anyone who’d be influence by my opinion to think more confidently for themselves instead.

But today, I’m going to break with that tradition.

On this, the eve of the Iowa caucuses, I’m going to give an unqualified, fervent endorsement for Paul.

Paul represents one of the  most important things I believe – the need to push libertarian legislation and policy into the mainstream of American political thought.

Oh, yeah – just so we’re clear, I’m talking about Senator Rand Paul.

I know.  He’s not running for President – not this time.  And that’s fine – because I’m not endorsing him for President.

I’m endorsing his approach to pushing the ideas and ideals of liberty into the mainstream of Republican politics.

Oh, his father, Ron Paul?  The guy breaks my heart.  Yeah, he’s a big-L libertarian and all, but even if you leave out the racist rants from thirty years ago (and even if we do, the media won’t allow the electorate to ignore them – and the electorate should be aware!), he’s basically claiming he can balance the budget on the back of defense, while he’s proposed nothing as far as cutting and reforming entitlements, which is basically saying “the dog ate my homework” if your campaign is ostensibly based on, y’know, reforming government.

No, I’m endorsing Rand Paul for the very reason I’d love to be able to endorse his father.  When I left the GOP in 1994, I did it because I wanted to belong to a party that believed in Liberty, the Bill of Rights, Originalism, and the whole idea that this nation is built on inalienable rights, not entitlements deeded to us by the Government.

And I spent four years interacting with people whose entire involvement in politics was to endlessly reiterate pure ideology, secure in the knowledge that they’d never have to actually tackle a budget or try to downsize a bureaucracy, since none of them were ever going to get elected to anything, ever.  Ever.  And I came back to the GOP, reasoning that it’d be easier to get the GOP to adopt enough Libertarian ideals to be palatable, and still be able to get people elected to get some – enough – of those ideals moved into some sort of policy.

Ron Paul has been a GOP Congressman for a long, long time.  And he’s had a positive effect on the GOP – when he’s bothered to exert his influence in the party.  But in 2008, when it became clear the nomination was far out of reach, he endorsed Libertarian party candidate Chuck Baldwin for President.  Which is marginally less useful that lighting up that endorsement and burning it – and set a noxious example for Paul’s followers; if you don’t get what you want, walk away.

An example too many of his followers claim they’ll follow, if Paul doesn’t win the nomination.  It’s especially true of the “Young Republicans” who, we are told, are very solidly behind Paul – and, some say, likely to sit out the election if Paul doesn’t get nominated.  Which is – I’ll be tactful – a lousy idea, this notion that you’ll “teach the GOP a lesson” by rewarding the US with another term of Barack Obama.

Parties don’t “learn lessons”, they reflect commitment.

And if you take your toys and go home, that’s exactly what will happen; the GOP will reflect your (withdrawal from ) commitment; Obama will benefit from it.

Answer this honestly; do you believe the nation will be better off under Obama than under even purported “RINO” MItt Romney?  Why?

And that’s why I’m endorsing Rand Paul – not for President (yet) but because he, unlike his father and way too many of his father’s supporters, knows that politics is a marathon, not a sprint; and that the cause of Liberty is better served by working within, and sometimes fighting like hell within, a party that is sympathetic (if not always actively enough) to Liberty, as opposed to the party that believes it’s just another word for having your wants satisfied.  And he knows that if he and his Liberty-loving followers don’t let up, they can get it all – elected, and  the opportunity to get their ideals actually enacted into law.

UPDATE:  Commenter “Courier J” notes that I got the name of the Libertarian Party’s candidate in 2008 wrong – it was Bob Barr.

I was only partially wrong, of course; Rep. Paul came on the Northern Alliance when he was in town for the “Campaign for Liberty” event, just before the RNC (the same day Sarah Palin was chosen as McCain’s running mate).  He gave a fairly churlish interview in which he urged conservatives disaffected by McCain’s coronation to check out Larry Hagelin (of the Natural Law party), Barr, and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, whom Paul eventually did endorse.

Which was, of course, the point of my post.

Acting Republican Party chair Kelly Fenton released the fully-digested list of Republican Party debts this morning.

From the email, which went to State Central Committee activists:

In addition, from the email, Fenton notes:

In addition to the amounts above, there are two major considerations that must be acknowledged. First, several law firms did considerable work in late 2010 on the Emmer-Dayton recount. These law firms claim they are owed approximately $719,000. The Party’s position has been that those obligations belong to a separate corporation set up in 2010 to fund the recount. At least some of the law firms are claiming the obligations belong to the Party. We are not acknowledging these bills as Party obligations, but are reviewing the claims with attorneys.

The other consideration is a request from the receiver in the Tom Petters receivership to recover funds contributed by Petters to the RPM in the amount of $75,000. Again, we are not acknowledging that as a Party obligation at this point pending legal review.

Although the last $800K of that debt is in question, expect the media to roll all of that into a nice, round “RPM owes $2 million” headline.

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of work – just in time for the State Central Committee meeting tomorrow in Saint Cloud.

My opinion – and I’m not a State Central delegate, so that’s all it is?

• The Executive Committee – the various heads of the Congressional District units – need to take a much more active role in overseeing the activities of the Chair, Deputy Chair and Treasurer.
• The State Central Committee needs to stop acting as a rubber-stamp body – even if it means asserting its means to do so at the meeting tomorrow.  The operations of the MNGOP have tended – in my experience, anyway – to be exceptionally top-down, which is perhaps fitting for an organization whose last four chairs (Cooper, Eibensteiner, Carey and Sutton) have been business executives in their pre-party lives.

…where we will, hopefully, pick a State Chair that’ll lead the party back to solvency and effectiveness, I was thinking about writing an article with a challenge to the new Chairman.

But then I thought about it for a while; the real challenge isn’t for the Chair; it’s for all you grassroots members across the state.  You’ve got the real work to do.

It’s time for the grassroots to stop taking leadership for granted; we don’t do it in Washington, we should not do it with our party.

So this February, when we start the series of conventions, from precinct all the way up through your Congressional district, that send the next flight of delegates to the State Central Committee with the ability to vote for things like “state party budgets” and “State Chairpeople”, it’s time to make sure that we send people who are committed to making sure that things change for the better and stay that way.

It won’t change anything for this coming Saturday – but it’ll be the group of people who run the party going into the next gubernatorial election, in 2014, when, once again, it’s for all the marbles in Minnesota.

So all of you Ron Paul fans out there?  The point is, if you want to affect how a major party works, you have to show up – and keep showing up, until you actually start having an effect.  The Caucuses in February are just the beginning.

Early on in the Koch mess, the rumors and mumbling started; the “inappropriate relationship” between Senator Koch and the “unnamed male staffer” was the symptom, not the disease.  More to the point, it may have served as a facile, sensational, headline-grabbing pretext for a much deeper conflict in the GOP – a conflict driven by money, by ideological rifts within the GOP on a third-tier issue, and by their influence on key figures in the MNGOP, up and down the food chain.

The issue is gambling – an issue that matters not an iota to the vast majority of Minnesotans, other than as the odd bit of recreation.  But it’s where Big Business and Big Morals butt heads.

And Big Tribes.

There are really three sides to this battle:

1. The Tribes, who by dint of Rudy Perpich’s compact legalizing reservation casino gambling compact in 1989 have an almost-complete legal monopoly on legal non-charitable, non-pari-mutuel  gambling in Minnesota.
2. The Anti-Gambling Crowd, the variety of social conservative groups that oppose all gambling – certainly any expansion of the status quo.  Among others, the party’s official platform in theory puts the Minnesota GOP in this camp.
3. The “Racino”, Canterbury, The Block E Casino and other non-tribal gambling proposals.  This is any and all combinations of non-tribal gambling, including expansions of gambling at Canterbury Downs.

(Here’s a handy history of gambling legislation in Minnesota).

All three groups pour money into the issue – into lobbyists, PR, campaigning, and all the other things that money buys in politics.

And the three groups form an uneasy troika.  The Tribes want their monopoly, and see Racino and further expansion of Canterbury Downs as a threat to their long-term…well, if not “livelihood”, at least a good chunk of their prosperity.   The various non-tribal interests, Racino and the rest, pay good money to get their views across to legislators.

And like the Troika in the old Soviet Union, politics always pit two of those groups against the other.  In this case, the anti-gambling forces and the tribes have united against “Racino” and the other non-tribal proposals to stymie any further expansions of non-tribal gambling and, from the tribes’ perspective, erosions to their very profitable status quo.

(And don’t get holier-than-thou, DFLers – the tribes are the second-biggest donor to the DFL and its candidates, year-in, year-out, behind only the Teachers’ Union (and, some years, even beating the teachers out for the top spot).

Sarah Janecek, whose blog is the most essential new blog in Minnesota this year, is covering the entire flap.  Over the next week or so, I’m going to look at some of Sarah’s coverage of this story.

Brian Lambert wants someone to do the reporting for him, in re my piece last week on the Koch flap:

Mitch says he’s friends with the two names involved in the incident. So call them up and have them, you know, emphatically, explicitly deny on the record what everyone is tittering about.

Heh.  Brian’s a kidder. He kids.

Nobody’s denying anything to me – partly because I’m not calling anyone to ask anything.  At this point, I don’t much care, because:

• All I care about is the way forward for the GOP.  There’s a much bigger story in this flap than a bunch of high-level canoodling – and the MNGOP needs to focus on its future – not on feeding the Media’s agenda. Speaking of which…
• Any digging I do do, will not be for the benefit of the mainstream media.  Any of them.  The Twin Cities’ mainstream media is nothing but the PR arm of the DFL.  Don’t believe it?  Compare the “rectal exams” the mainstream media gives to GOP candidates compared to the gauzy, soft-focus fluff jobs that Barack Obama and Mark Dayton got and continue to get.   Major, serious quesitons about Mark Dayton’s alcoholism and mental health were “covered” by one single Strib piece run eleven months before the election – which is about ten and a half months before anyone outside the wonk class was paying attention.  This is the template for all Twin Cities media political coverage.  Pass on details about GOP rhubarbs to the media?  Why not call them in to Ken Martin while I’m at it?
• Mr. Lambert? If you can’t show me some evidence that you never, not even once, said about Clinton and Lewinski “It’s just about sex!  Moooooove on!”, then really, we have nothing to talk about.

Every once in a while, someone asks me “why doesn’t True North write more nice things about Ron Paul?”

I wrote their answer over at True North.  Go check it out if you’ve a mind to, as all those people in the Appalachian hollers to whom I’m not at all related would say.

For my part?  I’m a libertarian-conservative, and a former Libertarian conservative.  But Paul has always bothered me, for a variety of reasons; I’ve wished, fervently, for Libertarianism to have a better spokesman that Rep. Paul.  Still, he’s the farthest they’ve gotten; if Paul had happened when I was in my four-year stint as a Libertarian, I’d have no doubt been an enthusiastic supporter.

To a point.

Anyway – check the whole thing out at True North.

Yesterday, in the latest installment of my “What The Hell…” series on the MNGOP (which may soon top my “Twenty Years Ago Today” series for longevity), Chad the Elder from Fraters Libertas left a comment:

At what point do we just say enough is enough and start all over with a new party? The current version of the Republican Party of Minnesota has proved incapable of taking advantage of a politically favorable climate and can’t even manage its internal matters. There is no leadership right now and I don’t see any on the horizon either. I’m usually aversive to third party talk, but short of moving to another state, what other option do conservatives in Minnesota have? No matter how much bailing we do, this ship is going down

Great question.

It was in 1995, after a stunning electoral win, that I left the GOP.  Part of it was the 1994 Crime Bill; I thought that if the GOP could acquiesce with such a noxious piece of legislation when they held the political uppoer hand, what good were they?  I mean, they were happy to take money from all of us gunnies – and then they screwed us?

Part of it was the ongoing legacy of Arne Carlson.  He was a Republican who governed more like a liberal than the DFLer he replaced. He spend surpluses like a meth whore with a stolen platinum card.

I’d had enough.  I joined the Libertarians, and even ran for office (and won at least a moral victory).

And then I looked at what it’d take to make the Libertarians – or any “new”, as opposed to “Third” , party a contender.

Think about it:

• A presence statewide- as in, people, on the ground, in all 134 House Districts, organizing…
• Volunteers – the people who drop the lit and plant the lawn signs and make the phone calls – are effectively employed.  Of course, volunteers, at least beyond the tiny fringe of true believers any party will draw at least a few of, only tend to come out if you show the slightest chance of actually mattering.  Which comes from having that “statewide presence” above, as well as…
• Money – yep, it’s the oil that greases the skids of American politics. And while you can work the odd little miracle here or there without much of it, retail politics is much better with than without.  Which means you need…
• Fundraising infrastructure – you need money people; people with money, and (more importantly) people who can talk people with money out of that money for a new party.    Oh – and as we’ve discovered in the MNGOP, you need…
• Management – Parties like the Constitution, the Greens, and the Libertarians tend to be “run” by people who are long on ideological zeal, and short on accounting, fundraising, and people-management.  And that’s OK – because there’s no money to account for, nobody donating more than the odd few bucks, and nobody to manage.  Once you get to the level where you have fundraising going on, and payroll to make, and schedules to follow, and FEC and MNCFB rules to be aware of? All the zeal in the world is of no use if you wind up broke, with unpaid workers and disorganized campaigns and in a world of hurt from the Feds and State.

One flap I missed in this morning’s rundown of the present and future of the MNGOP was the railroading of Brandon Sawalich.

Sawalich was arrested last week for driving a truck with expired tabs.  The airport police grabbed and detained him, and initially moved to charge him with a gross misdemeanor that means, essentially, “tax evasion on wheels”…

…before they discovered a “clerical error” that showed his tabs were six, not 18, months out of date.  Anyway – it led Sawalich to bow out of the MNGOP Chair race (prematurely and for all the wrong reasons, according to some, and I don’t entirely disagree).

Mr Dilettante covered the “story” as well as anyone – and by “story”, I don’t mean Sawalich’s utterly mundane offense, but the media’s approach to covering a prominent Republican, which D accurately termed more a “rectal exam” than news coverage:

So, Sawalich is out of the race, has paid for his tabs and is presumably going back to being a private citizen. End of story, right? If you thought so, you don’t understand the modern media environment. The Star Tribune saw fit to add a completely gratuitous paragraph to the end of his account, detailing events in Sawalich’s life that happened 8 and 10 years ago, respectively. If you want to see what they are, you can click on the link, but I’ll not share them here. Sawalich is apparently 36 years old, which means that the events in question happened when he was less than 30 years old. In other words, even though he is now out of the race, Sawalich was Emmerized.

To the editorial board and, I suspect, not a few of their reporters, Republicans are like wild boars; you have to make sure they’re dead.  There’s no such thing as overkill.  Classic example; the Strib’s coverage defamatory lynching of Alan Fine in 2006; 32 column inches about a “domestic violence arrest” that never resulted in a conviction, had no physical evidence, and was completely expunged, that ex-wife in question had herself garnered a domestic violence record, and the widely-abused nature of these sorts of charges – all to smack down a candidate who might have gotten 35% with a tailwind and without a Ventura Party candidate who made moderate-to-Republican noises.  Such are the precautions the media must take to ensure the victory of a deeply-flawed, yapping little schnauzer like Keith Ellison.

There’s a message in that last paragraph — if you would seek to be a prominent Republican, or even prominent in the inner workings of the party, you can expect to have every indiscretion of your life shared with the world. So you’d better damn well keep your light under a bushel.

That’s what Alinsky preached.  It’s what the DFL – and their willing accomplices in the media – practice.  It should surprise nobody.

Wow.  It was a rough week for the Minnesota GOP, wasn’t it?

It’s not entirely a rhetorical question.  We’ll come back to that.

———-

When I am smack in the middle of a crisis, there are a few little aphorisms and bromides that I run through my mind; like rosaries if you’re Catholic, or mantras if you’re a meditator, or the Lord’s Prayer for that matter.  They tack on a bit of pithy temporal wisdom, and help put the mind…well, not so much “at ease” as “into focus”.

Keep Your Head Down And Your Thumb Up Your Ass And Keep Walking. – It’s an old British Army infantryman’s saying; let’s presume it’s a metaphor; it is certainly a crude way of saying “the greatest virtue is perseverance”.

A little less profane? This Too Shall Pass.  – most of you know this one.  It’s an ancient Sufi saying; Abraham Lincoln used it.  Nothing bad – or good – lasts forever.  Life – and poliitcs – is a marathon, not a sprint.

And while I try not to find ‘wisdom” from Hollywood, I have always loved the line “The Only Way Home Is Through Berlin”.  It was Tom Sizemore’s line in Saving Private Ryan; it means the job isn’t going away, so put your head down, and your thumb yadda yadda.  I usually think of it after “This too shall pass” – because “this” frequently won’t “pass” without a hell of a lot of work.

And one way or another, that’s pretty much what we have to do.   Tough it out.  Shake it off.  And remember what matters.

And we’ll come back to that too.

———-

Here’s another saying I love to remember at times like this:  it’s from P.J. O’Rourke; “LIfe is full of ironies, for the stupid“.

The blog posts and tweets started almost immediately after Tony Sutton resigned – “What?  The party of fiscal respnsibility is a half a million in bet?  Isn’t that ironic?”  And after Amy Koch resigned, and after Senators Hann, Gerlach, Senjhem and Michel held their press conference in which they revealed the “inappropriate relationship with a male staffer”, out they came – “G’huk’, g’huk – the “party of family values!  How ironic!” said the pack of …

…I was about the call them “drooling misanthropes”, but the American Union of Drooling Misanthropes called; they don’t want ’em. I’m at a loss.  I’ll just leave it there.

People make mistakes; they err; they sin; that people aren’t perfect and can’t be perfected, especially not via politics and laws, is a key tenet of classicla conservatism.  People make mistakes; there are consequences.

The GOP leadership got out ahead of the story on Friday, more or less. About this, John GIlmore at Minnesota Conservatives wrote:

Then, as if to mock sanity, four lumbering senators, full to overflowing with themselves, held the Hindenburg of press conferences. Sens. David Hann, Geoff Michel, David Senjem and Chris Gerlach decided that a press conference of apparently endless proportions would be the best response to the unfolding calamities. Michel spoke and far too much. All the men sounded like Rush Limbaugh’s new castrati and the local premiere female conservative radio talk show host Sue Jeffers acidly noted today the lack of inspiration, push-back or general strength. Instead it was all hang dog and maybe the press will not flay us overly much. Please like us!

On the one hand Jeffers and Gilmore were right – the four Senators should have dug into the DFL and the Media; I think the phrase “anyone who said, in 1998, that “it’s just sex, and peoples’ private lives, and just moooooove on, because peoples’ personal business that doesn’t affect their jobs doesn’t count” should be sure to shut up” should have popped up.

On the other hand, can you imagine the GOP trying to sit tight and hope that the media wouldn’t get the story sooner than later?  And we all woke up on Monday morning with John Croman or Erik Black screaming “What was the MNGOP covering up?”

Because that was, pretty much, the alternative.

———-

Anyway – that was last week.  What about this week?

About the Koch kerfuffle:  calm down.  People make mistakes; sometimes they do the wrong thing.  As we noted above, conservatives know this (although Republicans don’t always).

Conservatism – and, when it’s working, the GOP – is about principles, not people.  People fall short; principles give you something to strive for.

The Democrats, and DFL, are all about people, and cults of personality; Mark Dayton won this past election not by dint of any princples or beliefs or even non-laughable campaign promises, but by a combination of Dayton’s name ID (as much about the Daytons stores as Dayton’s time in the Senate) combined with a sleazy, ‘third-party” personality-assassination campaign against Tom Emmer.

People come and go.  Principles go on.  The GOP must not go into this next session playing hurt.  We have the upper hand; if the Sutton and Koch stories weren’t intended to whittle that upper hand away to benefit the DFL, the media wouldn’t cover it to the extent they are (in the way that they didn’t cover the DFL’s own financial woes two years ago).

The Republican party is really two things – a set of principles (these days, largely conservative), and a non-profit organization with an office and a (acting) chairman and staff and a budget.

And it’s that last bit – fixing the Republican Party of Minneosta, Inc. – that’s going to be the big job.  GIlmore:

The way forward is straight forward. The wounded must be tended to, with simple basic human decency. The selection of the RPM Chair takes on even more importance although everyone seems to be looking for a magic bullet of a candidate. That candidate doesn’t exist. Senate leadership has much to account for; misdirection won’t work this time.

John sticks the landing – and that’s where you come in.  The MNGOP – the non-profit political party, not the principles – has often operated below the radar for activists. That has to change; at this next State Central meeting on December 31, people are going to have to buckle down and demand answers; where’s the balance sheet?  Who do we owe money to?  Why?  That’s just the beginning.   If party leadership doesn’t have the information needed for the Central Committee to make informed decisions about the budget distributed to the Central Committee by 12/31, the budget must be tossed.   We can accept no more excuses.

———-

So if you’re a Republican?  Gilmore wrote:

Today has been quiet although MC was reduced to tears when receiving a phone call in the middle of Costco detailing the human cost of these events. There’s nothing quite like crying in public, is there?

Relax.  Sack up, people.  Your dog didn’t die.  It’s a political party; we’re not curing cancer, here.  A politician fell short of our ideals; our party’s management revealed some deficiencies.

Question:  How much worse would this have been had it come out last March?  Or next October?  We’ve got 10 months to turn this thing around.  And not only is that doable – it’s also an eternity in politics.
———-
So where do we go from here?

To cop one more line from Hollywood:  Ed Harris in Apollo 13.

No, not “failure is not an option”, because it certainly is.  A bad one, but an option.

No, it’s the other one, the one the business writers never get but every Churchill fan does;

“With all due respect, sir, I believe this’ll be our finest hour”.

We owe ourselves, and this state, no less.

This too shall pass.  Of course, it’s going to be hard – but the only way home is though Berlin.

So it’s time to put your head down and…

…well, you get the idea.

Let’s be clear on this; I oppose government funding for stadiums.  All of it.  Any government.  Ever.  End of sentence.

Zigi Wilf could afford to build his own stadium.  But the status quo in the sports industry today is to treat stadia as a public good – which is a loathsome perversion of the idea of “public good”.

The big “Zero” in this debate so far has been Governor Dayton. The Governor’s entire approach to this issue could be summarized as “Hey, you guys – get something done! I don’t want the NFL goons tramping through my office again”; it’s what peple call “leading from the rear”.

And if there’s a hero? It’s the Senate GOP Caucus. It was the Senate Republicans – especially Senator Robling – who’ve managed to cut the crap and get “both” sides – the NFL, the state, and the various local and county governments who,alternately, crave the crowds and commerce but who’ve gone all Ron Paul about paying the tab, and of course RT Rybak, who wants to commit his city full of compliant DFL sheeple and ripe business sucks to a big share of the tab…

…which is dumb, but hey, I didn’t vote for him. Anyway – for cutting to the chase, and getting Zygi Wilf out of all of our pockets and fixing him up with a politician who actually believes he has the political oomph to stick his city with a $1000/head bill.

Am I cynical to say “it’s your problem, now, Minneapolis”?  (No, I’m not being a hypocrite; I have been to exactly zero Vikings games at the Dome since 1987 – and even then, I was working).

On a bit of a tangent – this is a great example of an issue where principle and politics are completely at war.  It is a fact that if you’re a conservative, spending public money on stadiums is anathema.  It’s also a fact that this is a state full of voters who want their damn football team, and they don’t really care (or think that hard about) who pays for it.  Emphasis on “voters”.

It’s not the ideal solution – especially if you’re in Minneapolis – but the fact that we have a (potential) solution is entirely due to the Senate GOP caucus.

The DFL and Media (ptir) are focusing heavily on the current “battle” between the MNGOP’s “establishment” – more on that in a bit – and the “Grassroots”.

This pops up most frequently in situations like the 2006 Sixth District caucuses, where the “establishment” got exercised because Michele Bachmann flooded the caucuses with “her” people – which elsewhere in politics is called “getting elected”.

Ditto 2008, when the Ron Paul crowd flooded the caucuses.  The big story was the newbies’ passion and, er, numbers, versus the “establishment”‘s ire at their purported party (in both senses of the term) being crashed.   The Paulbots complained, then and now, about the welcome they got from “the Establishment” – not realizing that had they stuck it out a few more years and put some of their passion into organization and longevity, they just might be the GOP “Establishment” today.

Anyway, whenever things like candidate insurgencies, waves and tempest-in-a-teapot controversies befall a party, there are inevitably calls for “Unity”.

Craig Westover, writing in True North, commented on another excellent TN piece by J Ewing (on which I commented at length on my show over the weekend).

Grassroots activism is absolutely necessary to keep the establishment honest – wherever the line is drawn. To Mr. Ewing’s point, effective grassroots activism eschews the ad hominem attacks and vindictive searches for conspiracies and scandals and focuses on issues of principle, and a wise establishment takes grassroots criticism as the opportunity for some soul-searching reevaluation of their own commitment to the Party’s common vision and objective that starts with winning elections.

That’s the key – and hard – part; having a disagreement and a debate that matters without having the circular firing squad for which the MNGOP is so very famous.  “Disagree without being disagreeable” is the line (all too often coming from people who then go on to be extremely disagreeable, but them’s the breaks).

But unity has it limits:

However, contrary to Mr. Ewing’s conclusion, the relationship between grassroots and establishment remains, and should always remain, tense and somewhat contentious. Good leadership exploits that tension; it doesn’t waste time trying to negate it with pleas for “unity.”

Consider: Lemmings personify the ultimate unity.

That’s the real challenge; the “divide” between the “Grassroots” and the “Establishment” can be a very, very good thing.  You just have to have people, and a party, that’s smart enough to use it.

Brian Lambert at the MinnPost h quoted me the other day:

Minnesota’s most prominent conservative bloggers are oddly quiet about the party’s exciting weekend.

Minnesota’s “most prominent” conservative bloggers – Powerline, Ed Morrissey – don’t do much coverage of local politics much less the inner workings of the MNGOP.

Of course, those of us who do cover the state – Gary Gross, True North and the Dogs – certainly did cover the “exciting weekend”; most of them were there at the Doubletree along with me.

But Lambert noticed I’d been writing on the subject:

But at Shot in the Dark, Mitch Berg takes a run at it:

Lambo grabbed a lengthy quote from this piece here.  It ended with this bit:

And yet the GOP — which, for all its faults, is the only actual transparent political party in this state (if only because nobody, but nobody, cares about the Independence Party) — is going to have to get through some of this BS to go forward.”

…and he added…:

… But just “some” of it.

Yep.  Just some.

I said it on the radio over the weekend, and I’ll stand by it; the whole incident is going to be a good thing for the MNGOP, if it tackles the issue head-on.  The party’s in debt:  so tackle the debt.  The party lost its statewide races and two recounts: so figure out what we need to do to fix it.  None of this is brain surgery – politicians do it, for chrissake.

And we’re going to tackle it a year before the election.  Oh, the media will do what they can to keep it current – but by next election time, the GOP will be out of the metaphorical woods, loaded for bear, with new leadership and (if a lot of us have our way) explicit confidence that we are on the right path financiallly.

The media – Lambert among ’em – what the GOP grassroots to look at the task at hand and get depressed and discouraged.

There is no reason for this.  The turmoil of this past two weeks is good news.  The GOP will be a much stronger party – as long as we tackle this head-on.

More about the GOP Chair race,and the future of the position, later in the week.

The question for today is “what should a party look like these days?”

The DFL has followed a model similar to many IT companies; they are basically a shell.that administers groups of programmers in India, Ukraine and the Philippines.

The DFL is more or less the same. They’ve farmed out a lot of that policy, publicity, advertising, and interacting with the public stuff to other groups:  Alliance for a Better Minnesota,whose mission is to collect money from “progressive” plutocrats and unions to waterboard context about Republicans; “Win  Minnesota”, which collects money from plutocrats and unions to distribute to, well, Alliance for a Better Minnesota.  Then there’s the unions – the MFT,AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, Teamsters…

…and of course, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits, Take-Action Minnesota, Common Cause,the League of Women Voters, MPIRG,and all the other non-profit agenda pimps…

…to say nothing of Big Feminist, Big Environment, Big Gay, Big Minority and Big Grievance (by which I mean the big, institutional lobbying arms of those social movements)

So what does this mean for a political party?

It means that the party can focus on running endorsements and a few other things, and leave all of the complicated stuff – advertising, communicating with voters, fundraising – to other other groups.  This is especially useful when it comes to trying to appeal to “big tents” full of voters; the unions can reach out to their constituents, and have their messages carefully sequestered away from Big Environment’s countervailing message, and neither will be the wiser.  (I think that’s part of the reason that so much of the messaging coming from the DFL proper is so very very stupid; all the talented communicators are working for 527s.

Of course, this means that the 527s are a little more equal than the voters – and to the DFL’s activists. And if Republicans wonder about how their party’s budget’s been spent, and want more transparency?  The money spent getting Democrats elected is accountable only to a raft of non-profit boards, union leadership and private parties with deep pockets.

Not a few Republicans have pondered if that’s the future of political parties; since so many businesses are doing more or less the same thing.  It’s probably irrelevant at the moment; there are not enough Republican-leaning 527s.  I’m not sure it’s something the GOP wants to do; I like the idea of standing in contrast with

More later this week.

OK, no substantive contributions to the debate this time – at least not me, myself.

But the ruling junta at True North has dedicated a section at the blog to the race for chair – and, more importantly, has sent out a questionnaire to the known candidates for the office.

And True North will run the candidates’ answers.  This is part of True North’s ongoing mission to make sure the Minnesota center-right gets the information they need – which used to be a pretty radical notion in GOP circles..

If you’re a MNGOP activist, you’ll want to watch that space.

OK – so we’ve established that the MNGOP needs to fix its finances, and knock off the circular firing squads.  That’s all fairly obvious – although seemingly inscrutable to some in the party.

But where do we go from here when it comes to leadership?

Derek Brigham at Freedom Dogs and True North wrote up the spec sheet:

My ideal chair would be a person who:

—Relates VERY WELL with the grassroots without alienating the establishment. Working the other way around has been the norm since I have been involved, but this will no longer work—honestly it never did. The numbers are with the grassroots, the leader should reflect this.

This is a tough one.  The “Grassroots” include a lot of people who come to their first meetings full of whiz and vinegar for an issue – who peter out as the reality of the long-term slog of party politics sets in.  And that’s where most of the energy comes from.  It’s a tough row to hoe.

—Envisions the MNGOP massively simplifying its tasks. As I wrote on Twitter a few days ago: “New agenda for party: do less, simplify, keep on track, let go of what you suck at, kick ass at what you do well”. The MNGOP at least for some time to come can not be all things to all people.

And it’s here that the DFL may have one of its few right ideas.  As I noted a few weeks back, the DFL is really just a holding company that outsources a good chunk of its organizing,media and policy work to outside groups with an interest in the subjects (where “subject” is something like, say, “running a toxic sleaze campaign against Tom Emmer” or some such). It’s not the dumbest idea they’ve had.

—Can pull in BIG Money players, and have several routes to bring in small (read: a buck at a time) donations.

Goes without saying. But it’s good Derek said it.

—Operates with transparency and honesty. People loathe the last many years of bad bookkeeping. Conservatives pride themselves on financial efficiency.

The next party chair is going to face very angry party electorate demanding a very high standard.

—Would not push morality issues. The world is in economic collapse, this should be easy. Get with the basics: Small government, Individual liberty and responsibility, Create an environment for prosperity.

Y’see, that should be a gimme.  The party isn’t supposed to push policy.  It’s a fund-raising, communications and logistics organization (I’m oversimplifying, but not much).

—Become THE friendly oasis for businesses with our message. The DFL and Dayton are an absolute cancer to business and productivity in this state. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

While that’s the candidates’ job, the party does need to make sure it’s clear on its message.  The 2010 elections showed that we can do it.

—Wants to take the bloated party platform down to fewer words than the Gettysburg address. Again, keep the principles strong and the words few.

Derek and I have been working on that for a while.

Another Twitter post I put up was this: “Want a party? Musts: Unite around core principles, Focus on opponents, Appeal to the Big money players, Avoid morality issues” Yes I do repeat myself a bit, but key in that statement was: Focus on opponents. There is a reason we play pin the tail on the donkey and not the other way around. You want to excel at in-fighting, go to a family reunion.

Let me sum it up: Win Elections For Our Principles.

And that’s gonna be an interesting order to fill.

I remember going to my first Fourth Congressional District convention.  It must have been in 2000; it was long before I had a blog.  I had been elected as a delegate from House District 66B; this was my first Congressional District convention, and my second convention of any kind at all.

And I sat in my chair, and waited for all the democracy to kick in.

And it did.  We listened to about two hours worth of speeches, if I remember correctly, before we got down to business.  Which was…

…about two hours of debating rules and picayune aspects of the Constitution.

Not the US Constitution, or even the Minnesota one.  The Fourth Congressional District COP Constitution.  And a group of three or four people, who seemed to live for this sort of thing, basically alternated back and forth on the microphones as the chair and parliamentarian fielded, processed and wove an ever-expanding web of motions, sub-motions leading to amendments, amendments to amendments…

…all to answer a question on the order of “do we allow the rules to be suspended to move the treasurer’s report in front of the teller’s report on the agenda?”, or something equally earth-shaking.

Of course, two things became clear:

1. This wasn’t entirely about convention rules; there was some subtext at work; old feuds, the detritus from years of people doing politics together resurfacing in the form of a squabble over some picayune aspect of parliamentary procedure or other.
2. But for some of them, it genuinely was about convention rules.  There are people on this earth who genuinely get exercised about that kind of stuff.

Judging by the utter boredom on the faces of the first-time conventiongoers around me – many of them last-time conventiongoers – I was hardly alone.

People who are drawn to the GOP don’t tend to be people who enjoy sitting in meetings, much less arguing about picayune parts of parliamentary procedure.  They – we – tend not only to be goal-oriented rather than process-oriented people, but to be the type that actively eschew politics for its own sake, preferring to actually change society for the better. It’s the same sort of things that draw people to the Libertarians or the Constitution or Green Parties – the urge to actually get out there and solve problems rather than sit in rooms and argue procedure until your butt falls asleep.

And yet to any party – the sheep-like DFL, of course, but the GOP too – are drawn people who do just love the whole “being a party” thing; people who love navigating the bylaws and codedils and playing politics, on the most venal possible level, for its own sake.

The rift over the weekend between Emmer Campaign and the Seifert/Party Establishment crowds was a bit of deja vu.  There may be no more beaten-down organization in this country than the Saint Paul Republican City Committee and its various wards and districts.  So nobody, perhaps, was more surprised than Saint Paul Republicans a few years back when, hard to the heels of two devastating electoral losses state and nationwide, Republicans captured a community council deep in the heart of stereotypically-DFL-dominated Saint Paul…

…and promptly proceeded to watch the victory dissolve in infighting, squabbling, backstabbing – the kind of stuff the Saint Paul City Committee is usually known for.

Too many Republicans seem to have forgotten Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment; duke it out with Republicans, but keep it in the house.  Never, ever bag on fellow Republicans in public.  Even ones you disagree with.  Even ones who you detest.   Especially not to the media, who are – never ever forget this – working for the other side.

(Some leftyblogger will chime in here with “what about the Override Six?  What about Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger?”  Only half of that chime-in is dumb; Carlson and Durenberger endorsed Democrats and used their remaining political capital to attack the GOP; while as a Norwegian-American I might not have used the term “Quisling”, Tony Sutton was absolutely right to toss them from the party.  As to the Override Six – it was endorsing activists that got ride of two of them, and the voters that got the others).

A fair chunk of the GOP – the part of it that is into the “party” stuff more than the “getting government off our backs” bit – needs to remember what the actual goal of all this party-mongering is.  It’s not more party-mongering.

Much more later this week.

Last week was a big one for the Republican Party of Minnesota.

On the eve of the winter Central Committee meeting, chairman Tony Sutton resigned.  As I noted last week, Sutton – and his deputy until last October, Michael Brodkorb – were transitional figures for the MNGOP.  Speaking as a D-list pundit rather than an insider, they did a great job of making the party more available, and giving access to the party and its people to the only media they have on their side, the conservative alternative one.

Of course, there was the matter of the budget.

On the one hand, Sutton spent some money.  The party is at least a half million in debt.

On the other hand, the MNGOP had a big challenge; in the middle of a terrible economy, to try to beat the DFL…

…well, no.  The DFL isn’t really a party anymore.  It’s a holding company that manages a brand and farms out the actual work, and fundraising, and spending, to outside groups like Take Action MN and Alliance For A Better MN and Alida Messinger (whose idea of fundraising is reaching into her purse for a checkbook) and Minnesota’s unions (whose idea of fundraising is taking dues from their membership, 46% of whom vote Republican, and giving 92% of it to Democrats).  Anyway – Sutton and the MNGOP had to fight against an avalanche of outside and union money.  It takes money to fight money.

On yet another hand, at the party level, the spending doesn’t seem to have worked; the GOP lost all of the races for which it was primarily responsible – the State Auditor, Attorney General and Secretary of State races.

On another of those hands, it was sitll a great cycle for the MNGOP brand.  Perhaps you recall – we won quite a few races.  Flipped the House and Senate. Came within 8,000 votes of winning the governor’s race; I’m convinced there’d be at least 8,001 do-overs for Emmer if we held the election today). It was a good cycle.

Then again, those races were mainly the job of the Legislative GOP caucuses – which did a great job of raising and distributing money effectively, and helping with the campaigns that made such a huge, crucial difference last election and (more importantly) last session.

And on the final hand, if you look at the budget today, it’s hard to tell where the money went, or who we even owe money to.  And it’s causing quite a bit of dissent within the party; at last weekend’s Central Committee meeting, the budget – which normally gets rubber-stamped without a lot of thought by a room full of delegates that just want to get out of there – was tabled until a meeting in the near future.  And that is going to be a donnybrook, as new Deputy and Acting Chair Kelly Fenton and the remains of Sutton’s Executive Committee face a Central Committee that is laced with dissenters who are looking for solid answers.

And the media just loves it; as the Party airs three years of dirty laundry in public and monday-morning-quarterbacks the 2010 election cycle.  (Anyone seeing the wisdom of the DFL’s approach – not really being a party at all – yet?  All of this happens in private, in the offices of non-profits that answer only to themselves and their hand-picked boards, with not an iota of elected scrutiny).

The media – which is, now and always, in the bag for the DFL – is going to love this.

And yet the GOP – which, for all its faults, is the only actual transparent political party in this state (if only because nobody, but nobody, cares about the Independence Party) – is going to have to get through some of this BS to go forward.

So – what the hell do we do about the MNGOP, at this fraught and unprecedented fork in the road?

That’s the subject this week.

I’m at the MNGOP Central Committee meeting, at the Doubletree in Bloomington.

It’s a pretty big day here; Tony Sutton resigned last night (it’s been in all the papers).

Sutton was, I think, a transitional figure for the party.  The MNGOP has always been a very top-down party, Sutton presided over a party leadership that opened up the party to the grassroots more than any previous one – but whose institutional inertia still was heavily loaded towards insiders.   Such is the nature of political parties (the DFL is about the same, only different – it’s all about insiders from the various non-profts that are carrying most of the water for the actual party these days).

And it’s perhaps inevitable that Sutton’s record is mixed; he did a great job of scouting up major donors in a tough economy.  He also spent a lot of money – with good reason (we had an election to win, after two very bad cycles).

Unfortunately, his budget, in addition to being in deficit, was a bit opaque.  A group of activists is circulating a flyer saying that the GOP needs to provide the Central Committee’s delegates need to get not just the budget, but all the information leading to the budget, including a complete list of who the party owes money to, and how much.  And until that happens, there is really no excuse for passing the budget as submitted.  In the interest of disclosure, I was involved in writing thier flyer; the group involved represented a wide range of opinion; some long-time Sutton dissidents, some supporters with questions, some people who just want to see the party get on the right track and capitalize on the very real gains we picked up last election cycle.

Here’s the flyer:

The Republican Party of Minnesota Is Broke

It Is Your Job To Fix It.

 The MNGOP Is In Crisis

The Minnesota GOP is broke.  Worse?  Nobody knows how broke it is.

Ask the leadership for a balance sheet – nobody can provide one.  There is no transparency to this party’s budget process.

We’ve read the party’s list of creditors – and then read in the Star/Tribune that the party owes people who aren’t on the list.  Why?  Good question.  Nobody in this room can tell you.

You wouldn’t run your business this way.

It’s our job, as State Central Committee delegates, to fix this. 

State Central delegates are like a business’ board of directors; we provide a check and balance on management.   Delegates need all of the party’s information to make sound decisions. See Article II of the party bylaws for a job description.

We Propose A Solution – And We Need Your Help.

·        We need a plan to eliminate excessive debt, increase fundraising and win elections.

• We need full disclosure, accountability and transparency to form and implement this plan.
• We need a line by line analysis of the budget; where do the numbers come from? Are they effective uses of money? Is old debt included in these numbers?

To get the information you need to do your job as a delegate, you need to vote “No” on the proposed budget. 

 

There needs to be a discussion on the budget, the plan to get out of debt and on the party’s leadership.  Rubber-stamping the proposed budget will just kick the problem down the road.

Vote “No” on rubber-stamping the proposed budget.

A number of delegates are planning on submitting a motion to reject the budget and demand all of the needed information.

Not sure I’ll be able to hang around long enough to see that.  The acting chair is talking rules right now.  The joke is that they’re trying to bore any dissidents to death.

I don’t have a dog in the presidential fight yet.  I’m nowhere close to picking a candidate.

Oh, I am advocating – for principles.  Seeing which candidate best articulates what I believe in – whatever that is – is the real test for me.  And none of the candidates is perfect.  None of them ever are.

Other than me.  And I’m not running.

Of course, now is the time to be an uncompromising purist.  If you support Santorum?  Paul? Perry?  Accept no compromise!

I’ve got some of the same problems with Mitt Romney that most of us conservatives do; he’s the “establishment” pick, for starters.

Which is funny, since I caucused for him four years ago – because he was the conservative option in the field.

Joel Pollak at BigGov makes the conservative case for Romney.

The first part is one that the anybody-but-Romney crowd are downplaying – the wages of “electability”:

First, while Obama might drive even more voters to the conservative cause in his second term, he could make lasting changes along the way–especially on the Supreme Court–that would frustrate conservative political goals for generations.

Imperfect as Romney may be, it’d be much better to have him nominating people for the SCOTUS.

Second, foreign policy could return to the fore in 2012–and Romney is one of the few candidates who has a well-informed foreign policy consistent with Ronald Reagan’s tradition of American global leadership.

I’m a lot more comfortable with Romney on foreign than domestic policy.  And Romney has a better command of the issue than any of his opponents.

Of course, domestic policy is what this election is going to be about.  And while Romney may not be “the conservative” candidate, on business and economic issues I think he’s conservative enough.

Finally, while Romney is not quite the establishment figure he is often made out to be, there is something to be said for having an establishment, even one in need of reform. After the dramatic changes of the past decade, Americans are eager for stability. That is a fundamentally conservative impulse, and one that an establishment leader could satisfy.

Democrats believe the best charge against Romney is that he is a “flip-flopper.” It’s not Romney’s inconsistency that worries conservatives, but his underlying convictions. Yet if we consider that the Supreme Court may strike down all or part of Obamacare next spring, and that even a Democratic Congress failed to pass climate change legislation, we may be able to look past the most problematic of Romney’s previous positions.

Sue Jeffers hates it when I say “perfect is the enemy of good enough”.  Down that road, she yells at me, lies mushy importent Arne-Carlson-style RINO-ism.

Which is true.  But down the other road – uncompromising purism – lies the Libertarian Party where, untroubled by ever needing to govern by dint of having been elected to, well, anything, they can sit about their conventions and think big, pure thoughts.  Politics is about, well, not so much being impure, but about making compromises with the other side(s) from a position of such electoral strength that as much of your pure agenda as possible survives.

Michael Reagan put it well when Brad Carlson and I interviewed him at the Midwest Leadership conference; a key facet of his father’s greatness was not his purism – George Will wrote an entire book on how impure a conservative Reagan was – but on his ability to bring the impure to his side.  Which meant compromise.  The sort of thing the “anyone but Romney” crowd eschews today.

As they should – today.  And through the caucuses.  And all way to the Republican National Convention, if need be!

But if he gets the nomination – is he conservative enough?  That’s a great way to start an argument these days in conservative circles:

Romney may not have courted Tea Party support, but he has tacitly adopted key points of its conservative agenda–repealing Obamacare, cutting federal spending, and fixing the entitlement system.

Conservatives should consider supporting Romney–and do so while understanding that unlike Obama’s left-wing base, we will have to be as strong a check on a president we have elected as we have been against one we have opposed.

And that is the big takeaway; for Republicans, the Presidential race is only a quarter of the battle.  To really put a ding in the juggernaut of Obama’s legacy, we have to eject Obama, and take the Senate, and hold and preferably extend our lead in the House, and consolidate and expand our gains at the State level.  Partly to support (we hope) a new president.  And party to keep that new president honest – meaning conservative.