West Virginia Blue
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Leave it to a former West Virginia Republican John Cole to spot the obvious in front of us that I and others have overlooked about many West Virginia Democrats. Cole points out that many of the Democrats in the recent primary are really Republicans in all but registration. But the state has been dominated by Democrats for so long that the only vote that has really mattered for state and county races is the Democratic primary. Clem's mentioned this before how many of the Dixiecrats in West Virginia stayed Democrats instead of switching with the Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s. It's because the Democrats in West Virginia have remained the only game in town.
One point that is often not made enough is that many Democrats in WV and Kentucky and elsewhere are often times people are Democrats simply because it is the only game in town. One of the things that kept me reflexively a Republican is that in WV, pretty much the entire state was run by Democrats at every level.
Until recently, in WV, if you wanted to vote in a primary that mattered, you had to be a Democrat. My mother, who has voted Republican in pretty much every Presidential election in my lifetime, at least as far back as to Ford in 76 (I am not sure about Nixon, but I do not see her as McGovern voter), is a registered Democrat and has been all her life (she grew up in Maryland, moved to WV in the late 60's with my dad, who was from Ohio). As a registered Republican in WV until very, very recently, quite often there simply was NO CANDIDATE to vote for- if you win the Democratic primary, you have won the race.
Still, there's a good number of good Democrats in the state that have legitimate reasons for having voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton. Our job is to show them where Sen. Barack Obama is right instead of just labeling them all as racists as some would do.
I remember canvassing an elderly woman in Martinsburg in either '04 or '06 who had moved up from the southern part of the state. She said in the 1930s people received government assistance there if they were Democrats, but not if they were Republicans.
And many of us have canvassed in precincts where the voters are listed as Democrats (Precinct 21 in Berkeley County comes to mind), but have no intention for ever voting in presidential races for them. And this is a county where Republican registration is heavier than most. These DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) make up a significant portion of our list. One of the things that smarter GOTV will enable is to track their responses so we don't even stop by their doors and remind them to vote because they ain't going to vote Democrat any way in the general election.
Hat tip to Clem for spotting this, but photos of George W. Bush and any mention of him have disappeared from Shelley Moore Capito's web site and the West Virginia Republican party's web site. (Although judging from the WV GOP's new web site, the most important Republican in West Virginia is chairman Doug McKinney, whose turned the party's web site into his personal photo album.
It's amazing how far Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, a Bush Republican if ever there was one, and the West Virginia GOP are attempting to pretend their support of miserable failure George W. Bush never happened.
On neither Capito's web site nor on the West Virginia GOP site will you find a photograph of Bush.
Capito and the WV GOP know he's a miserable failure and they're deeply ashamed how much they support him. They have to hide their support because they know the majority of West Virginians and Americans disapprove of him.
Capito is trying to hide from the voters that she's supported Bush and was his 2004 West Virginia campaign chairman. Someone in the press should ask Capito or McKinney why they purged any mention of Bush from their web sites.
The "quirky" West Virginia GOP convention designed to shakedownmake the WV GOP relevant sort-of-kind-of-maybe select delegates for the national GOP convention drew the attention of The New York Times today:
CHARLESTON, West Va.-The 1,200 delegates who would determine how 18 of West Virginia's delegates are allocated at the Republican National Convention gathered inside a dingy hall at the civic center here this morning.
When a representative of Charleston's mayor took to the podium, hecklers shouted: "Where's the mayor?"
The man explained the mayor had other business to attend to so he could not be there, but the heckling continued.
It was a snapshot of the quirkiness of the state's nominating convention. West Virginia's statewide Republican primary will occur in the spring but in an effort to exert more of an influence on the presidential process, the state's Republican Party decided to hold a state convention today.
The process for the allocation of the state's delegates is a bit convoluted. County conventions were held across the state to select the 1,207 delegates for the state convention. These delegates in turn will vote today. The winner gets all 18 of the state's 30 delegates at stake today-nine delegates will awarded based on the results of the state's primary in the spring; three are at-large.
An interview with John McCutcheon, a state consultant for Mitt Romney, made clear why he is expected to win easily.
"We have had the only organizational presence in West Virginia to speak of," said John McCutcheon, a state consultant for Mr. Romney. "It's all Romney all the time."
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee captured the 18 West Virginia delegates up for grabs at the state's Republican convention on Tuesday, the first of many presidential contests on Super Tuesday.
Huckabee won on the second ballot, after supporters of U.S. Sen. John McCain switched their votes to him. That gave Huckabee 557 votes to 522 for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on the second ballot. McCain had 10 votes.
A candidate needed 50 percent of the ballots cast to get the 18 delegates to the Republican National Convention.
"The best scenario for the McCain campaign was to not have a Romney victory here today," said Gary Abernathy, a McCain supporter and former state Republican Party director.
The delegate switch didn't sit well with Romney supporters. "These are the juvenile actions of a morally bankrupt campaign," said John McCutcheon of the Phillips Group, which supported Romney's campaign in the state.
You know, sometimes I've just got to admire the wily slickness of former Fred Thompson supporter Gary Abernathy.
In all sincerity, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart: Congratulations to Gary Abernathy for his success at pissing off his fellow Republicans engineering a Huckabee win which translates into a McCain victory or something.
Those of us here at West Virginia Red love covering the state GOP convention for all of our readers.
I got an email today from someone asking me my thoughts on the West Virginia Republican Party on the eve of their state presidential convention.
We've got enough work to do with our own Democratic party, but I thought I would take a moment to talk about the Republicans because the Democratic dominance in the state isn't healthy for either party in the long run. Competition would make for better Democrats and also help weed out some of the DINOs and also help draw clear distinctions on important issues. I don't subscribe to David Broder's worship of "bipartisanship" which he seems to think means Democrats have to always be reasonable and give the cry-baby Republicans what they want. Partisanship is important because these issues do matter to people out on the street where policy affects lives.
For all the flaws in our Democratic Party, I thank God I'm not a Republican.
To be a Republican today means embracing torture, indefinite detention of suspects without the benefit of trial or legal counsel or the ability to know what evidence is being presented to "convict" you. It means support for indefinite wars from those who often refuse to enlist in them and "pre-emptive war" based off lies. It means hating: gays, liberals, people of color, even conservatives, as the Ron Paul supporters are finding out. It means surrenduring rights to authority in a way that would bring tears to the nation's founding fathers.
I've tried over my past four years of blogging to differentiate between conservatives and rightwingers. You see, the so-called conservative principles of respect for the rule of law, fiscal responsibility, small, limited government, a strong defense: I'm all for that.
But the Republican Party, while claiming to support conservative principles, has shown time after time that it is not at heart a conservative party but rather an authoritarian party. We've seen over the past seven years how quickly Republicans embraced record deficits, government expansion, and dictatorial powers possessed by a president who answers to no one and is a law unto himself.
I don't call myself "conservative" anymore, but when I did, conservatism to me meant being strong on defense (not strong on offense) and being fiscally sound.
Today's "conservatives" believe in spending and borrowing and "pre-emptive" wars. They believe that U.S. citizens can be detained indefinitely without charges and without the chance to defend themselves in court. When they want to win an election, they find a way to demonize homosexuals, immigrants, or Muslims.
Someday I may vote Republican again, but as long as "conservatives" are defined by Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, I'll never be a conservative again.
And this one from a former West Virginia Republican, John Cole at Balloon Juice:
All those years licking Bush's boots, and this is what you get in return- attempts to cut Medicare during an economic downturn during an election year where Republicans poll lower than herpes and Ann Coulter is promising to campaign for Hillary over McCain. Anymore compassionate conservatism and the GOP will be relegated to permanent minority status, with nothing but a few religious nuts, a couple warmongers, and Hugh Hewitt. Wouldn't that just be terrible?
Actually, it would be precisely what needs to happen- the GOP needs to be utterly destroyed, and that has been my goal for several years. I am really looking forward to slipping in that last knife.
What is it about your party that draws such reactions from people who had been on your side?
For Cole the final straw had been Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old boy that the rightwing noise machine attacked because he had the audacity to speak in favor of a federal government program to provide medical insurance for children who didn't have health coverage:
One of the things that is so surprising (for me, at least) about the whole Graeme Frost episode is that rather than make their case against this program with their vicious assault against this family, they Malkin/Freeper/Limbaugh brigade are doing just the opposite. Rather than expose this family as a bunch of frauds and lazy slackers and welfare queens, they are making the family's case.
If you look through this family's dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.
In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren't gay. They aren't divorced. They didn't abort their children. They aren't drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.
So as you look at your numbers and inability to draw more people, you've only got yourselves to blame. You've motivated your base to act on your behest through fear and hatred.
Even Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, who, while claiming to be the "civility" caucus, called those in favor of a timeline for benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet, a policy endorsed by countless retired generals, as aiding the enemy.
I recall canvassing a woman in Martinsburg in 2004 for a nonpartisan organization. She was a Republican. She said she was against the war and she thought the economy was terrible and that too many tax cuts went to the wealthy and to the corporations. Great, I thought to myself. She'll be voting for John Kerry. So I asked her who she'd be voting for. "George Bush." She said Bush would protect her marriage from "the gays."
So as leaders, you've helped train a large segment of voters to hate "the gays." Congratulations on appealing to the basest form of bigotry.
But like Capito and her support for Bush, you've painted yourself into a corner. The country is moving in one direction, a decidedly more progressive one, and you're moving in another, one decidedly more regressive. And you can't change course without alienating large segments of your ever shrinking base because you're the ones that helped teach them to hate. You can't go from condemning illegal immigrants for all the ills of the country and then try to embrace the growing numbers of Hispanic voters. You can't keep saying cousin Frank is a second class citizen because he's gay and then expect to win the vote of Aunt Betsy because Frank's her favorite nephew. And you can't call for an unnecessary war in Iraq, and then wonder why no one wants to fight in it, while ignoring the forgotten war and hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
At home, you cheered on coal baron Don Blankenship's blatant attempt to stock a state legislature with his hand picked candidates (how'd that work out for you?).
I hope at this convention you take a hard look at yourselves and don't ignore the log in your eye while blaming your problems on "liberals" and Democrats. But I know you will. While I also hope the West Virginia Republican Party is one day a worthy opponent for Democrats, your relegation to minority party status has been a trap of your own making.
I've recently viewed many many blogs operated West Virginia, and I have come to the realization that the majority of these blogs endorse the Republican Party. This blog at one time effectively (IMO) provided the West Virginia Democratic Party with some type of presence in the blogsphere, but we have been silent for quite some time now. I would love to return to the days of old where I could sit on my ass and post things frequently, but that time has come and gone, and for those of you whom consider yourselves West Virginia Democrats, I am happy to report to you that I will now commit myself to at least a monthly or biweekly post. These posts will not contain short comments regarding news articles, etc. I will deliver a more in depth analysis of any political piece that catches my eye, usually an attack piece on a right-wing operative or corrupt Republican politician.
I would like to touch upon my observation that many Republicans are flocking to blogs in West Virginia to vent on the Democratic party, and our state and national leaders. Why you ask? Why are they attracted to blogs? I'm asking the same question, and although I have not spoken with these misguided souls about their decision, I have rendered my best guess: as a result of their failures, their mis-managed party, their lack of qualified candidates, and their poor execution of campaign strategy, they have taken to the Internet, in particular the blogsphere, as a place to vent and attack the Democratic Party which they cannot defeat in the state of West Virginia. Perhaps they believe that their contributions to the blogsphere may land them a job writing for Red State, perhaps they want to be comforted by the fact that West Virginia Republicans 'really' exist; it must be difficult having to operate in the minority of political discourse constantly.
Another observation that I've made is the fact that Gary Abernathy, head of the consulting joke 'Abernathy Strategies,' is now offering Web Development and website maintenance to Republican candidates who purchase his services. I find this to be very funny considering that the Abernathy Strategies website looks like a twelve-year old girl developed the site on Geocities.. Seriously, who uses animated GIFs on professional websites these days, esp. those which are planning to offer services to potential leaders of state and local government?
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