The dying gasp of the RPV.
My political blogging, since 2003, has largely been about how the Republican Party is Virginia is crashing and burning. Their coming demise was obvious even then, back when they controlled just about everything—the house, the senate, our congressional delegation, and both U.S. Senate seats. To an outsider, I might appear something close to psychic, but to my fellow denizens of state politics, this has all been pretty obvious. As I’ve written, Virginia Republicans will always choose wrongly. Not wrong in hindsight, but wrong like should I pick up some dinner on the way home, or drive off a bridge? They always make the wrong choice, and that costs them at the ballot box every year.
The RPV had their ass handed to them this week, plain and simple. Jeff Frederick is the DPVA’s MVP right now. We knew he’d be a train wreck for the RPV, and he’s delivered in spades. With Virgil Goode’s defeat, Democrats now control our congressional delegate, both U.S. Senate seats, and the senate. There’s really no question that we’ll take the house next November, not now that Frederick is the RPV chair. The nomination of Gilmore and election of Jeff Frederick telegraphed a pretty clear message to many Republicans that their party had left them, that it was OK to vote for Mark Warner and maybe start thinking of themselves as an independent, rather than a Republican.
What does Jeff Frederick have to say for himself? In the latest RPV newsletter he offers this: “Heck, by any standard, we should have lost by double digits.” As far as he’s concerned, he’s been a big success, because “Democrats fell far short of the 25 seat gain in Congress and filibuster proof majority in the Senate they expected.” (He doesn’t mention that, on his watch, Virginia lost three seats in the House and one in the Senate.) Frederick labeled Obama a “hard-left socialist” one week ago, but today trumpets that it’s his conservative financial proposals that allowed him to win. At no point does he acknowledge his responsibility for the party’s failure, acknowledge his embarrassing feud with the McCain campaign, or indicate that any lessons have been learned. Delightfully, he shows that he’s learned precisely the wrong lesson, such as in this bit about Sarah Palin:
So it comes as no surprise that the scapegoaters are trying to lay Tuesday’s loss at her feet. What does come as a surprise is how openly some Republicans are jumping right in. Maybe I’m naïve, but I thought by now we Republicans would have learned our lesson and stopped giving gifts to the liberals to win their approval by going after our own.
Many don’t realize that the reason the liberals went after her so hard is exactly because she is an effective politician that threatens the turf they think only they should occupy.
The fact remains that Sarah Palin performed amazingly well given all the pressure she endured as she stepped from her Wasilla, Alaska home into the brightest of national spotlights. She is one of the few shining stars in a Party desperate for a little charisma and new faces. Sarah Palin is not going away any time soon — and thank goodness for that!
That’s the sort of talk that makes my heart soar like a hawk.
What I have to wonder is whether there are any adults left in the Republican Party of Virginia who can muscle Frederick out of his position and take the reins. They’re facing a minimum of a half-decade in the wilderness (I’m invoking the dead-hooker-or-a-live-boy rule here, of course, as is always implicit), though I suspect it’s something closer to permanent, to the extent to which anything in politics is permanent. The tiny base that’s willing to support this foolishness combined with the state’s demographic shifts may well ensure that.
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