A Republican star who managed the campaign that unseated Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle is preparing to become Sen. George Allen’s new chief of staff.
Dick Wadhams, who was campaign manager for Republican John Thune of South Dakota, will take over running the Virginia Republican’s Senate offices in January, Allen said yesterday. His announcement stoked further speculation about Allen’s ambitions.
The popular former governor has won steady mention in press reports among a potential pack of contenders for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008.
Wadhams, 49 and a Colorado native, is the kind of strategist a would-be presidential candidate would want to employ, GOP sources and an independent political analyst said.
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“We recruited the best pit bull out there,” a victorious Sen.-elect Thune said about Wadhams in the Rocky Mountain News.
Brad Woodhouse, a former spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Wadhams “has been associated with one brutally negative campaign after another.”
Of course, Republicans not flush with victory as Thune was will say that Wadhams is simply “effective” or “strong-willed,” or what have you, but the fact is that he runs extremely negative campaigns, and it works. George Allen may not be a very smart man, but, like President Bush, he surrounds himself with deft political characters. As with Jerry Kilgore’s recent hire of Scott Howell, it’s clear that Virginia Republicans are taking things up a notch.
The big question is whether my fellow Democrats are going to move up to take things up a notch, too. If we are true to form, we’ll run the same uncoordinated, disjointed campaigns across the commonwealth in the next year, get beat, wonder what happened, and do nothing differently. We will decry the nasty tactics that will predictably be employed by these campaigns and others, and we will still lose, because we would rather lose with honor than win without honor, forgetting that it’s possible to win with honor, too.
It doesn’t have to be like this. I’m working hard to ensure that I’m wrong. But the handwriting is on the wall. I’m no Daniel, but I do know that we are being “numbered, numbered, weighed, [and] divided.” Are we going to do anything about it?