It’s almost 2014. \u00a0Almost time for another mid-term election that’s going to pit the MNGOP – the party of plucky volunteers, creative fundraisers and circular firing squads – against the Minnesota DFL, the policy body on whose narrative’s behalf the Unions, the non-profits, the trial bar, the media, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota and a whooole lot of plutocrats with deep pockets and deeper white liberal guilt spend millions and millions and millions of dollars and hours of paid labor.<\/p>\n
The Minnesota GOP has always been a party of uneasy factions – although it really became an issue after about 1994, when the Reagan Revolution finally poked its nose out into the Minnesota cold.<\/p>\n
The GOP has quite a few factions these days:<\/p>\n
The Liberty movement likes to claim that the GOP can not win without it. \u00a0There’s a germ of truth to that. \u00a0The GOP needs the Liberty crowd’s numbers – and Liberty movement will never win anything on its own, either.<\/p>\n
Beyond that?\u00a0 None of the GOP’s factions is worth anything on its own; all of them are minorities within a large minority in this state<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And as long as the factions are bickering with each other, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell the Party is going to be of any use helping candidates reach out to enough undecideds, “independents” and newcomers to activism to help them get to the majority.<\/p>\n And the shame of it is, the factions do <\/em>agree on almost everything!<\/p>\n The Party – as in, the office full of functionaries down at 225 Park Avenue, kitty corner from the Capitol – needs to hold a “meeting of the five families”. \u00a0They need – in my humble opinion – to get the leadership of the various factions together to agree to put aside the things they disagree on (in public, anyway), and focus on the things that\u00a0do<\/em>, in fact, tie us together as a party. \u00a0Which involves negotiating – something most of the factions eschew – but negotiating with an aim toward changing the state’s (and the party’s) political climate\u00a0<\/em>so that all of the factions \u00a0have a shot at making the difference they want to make.<\/p>\n This might mean carving up some “turf”, ideologically. \u00a0It might also mean all of the factions realizing that even if you’re a liberty Republican or\u00a0a pro-lifer, having a Tea Partier or a business-first conservative in office is going to be a better proposition for your cause than, say, two chambers full of Paul Thissens.<\/p>\n Idealistic? \u00a0 Sure. \u00a0I’m a conservative in Saint Paul. \u00a0Idealism keeps me alive.<\/p>\n Pollyannaish? \u00a0About as Pollyannaish as Don Corleone’s “meeting of the five families”; \u00a0the MNGOP’s fratricidal bloodletting is a waste of everyone’s time and effort.<\/p>\n Making the GOP effective means finding a way to get the major factions to work together against the real enemy.<\/p>\n That’d be the DFL, for the benefit of some people I’ve met lately.<\/p>\n And – just a quick poll here – how has two years of circular firing squad done us any favors?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s almost 2014. \u00a0Almost time for another mid-term election that’s going to pit the MNGOP – the party of plucky volunteers, creative fundraisers and circular firing squads – against the Minnesota DFL, the policy body on whose narrative’s behalf the Unions, the non-profits, the trial bar, the media, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,13,101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mngop","category-republicans","category-what-the-hell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39152"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39180,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39152\/revisions\/39180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}