Will the Virginia GOP Shoot Itself In The Foot In 2016?

As the prior post noted, the attitudes and demographics of the nation are changing and the GOP is faced with shrinking appeal among voters and, but for gerrymandering, Republicans would hold far fewer seats in legislatures across the country. This trend is playing out here in Virginia and one sees time and time again the most extreme elements of the Virginia GOP base desperately clinging to the party's increasingly obsolete agenda of fostering right wing religion and subtle - and sometimes not so subtle - racism.  2016 could be a bell weather year for the Virginia GOP where a refusal to change course could be extremely damaging.  A piece in Outside the Beltway looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

At the end of this week, the Central Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia will meet to put together plans for the party’s nominating contests in 2016 and, as Norman Leahy and Paul Goldman explain, they could end up making a decision that will make Virginia rather irrelevant to the nomination process next year and harm the Republican Party in the General Election:

[U]nlike most states, Virginia allows its state parties to choose the method of nomination. Recently, Virginia Republicans have made a mockery of the party’s presidential-nomination process. Normally, the state party and its local committees help presidential aspirants get on the ballot. Pro-Clinton Democrats are helping her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), get on the ballot in New Hampshire. A real party wants to maintain the image of encouraging a free and open nomination contest.

Not so in Virginia. In 2012, only two of the many Republican presidential candidates managed to qualify for the primary because of the state’s restrictive ballot-access law. The traditional help went only to establishment favorite Mitt Romney. Barely 265,000 Republicans bothered to participate in this farce, a drop of 400,000 from the Bush win in 2000. 

The 2012 fiasco made Virginia a cable-news punchline. . . . state GOP leaders NOW seem eager to choose an insular convention system for 2016.

This isn’t a new territory for the Republican Party of Virginia, of course. In 2013, party activists with ties to the Tea Party and the Gubernatorial campaign of Ken Cuccinelli used their power on the committee to force a convention to pick the party’s 2013 statewide candidates rather than a primary.

Jackson lost the Lt. Governor’s race by a huge margin which made clear that even many mainstream Republican voters in the Commonwealth who voted for Cuccinelli could not support him,. Now, virtually the same group of activists who pushed for a convention in 2013 are arguing the party should do the same thing when it picks its Presidential nominee.

Given that Virginia has had a series of close elections since 2008, one would think this is an important concern for party leaders. Additionally, as with the caucuses we see in states like Iowa, conventions can be expensive and inconvenient, especially for people who have families. This means that fewer people participate in your convention, and thus the nominee you pick is more likely to represent a narrow segment of the party that may not play well with the electorate in the fall.

[I]n order for Republicans to win the Presidency they would need to win every state Mitt Romney won in 2012 as well as Ohio, Florida, and Virginia along with at least one other state that President Obama won in the last election. This makes Virginia crucial to the outcome of the election, and anything that the state Republican Party does to potentially make the state less competitive in the fall will have a big impact on the race.  If the committee members are smart, they will stick with a primary. Given the rigidity of the activists who seem to be driving the car in the RPV at the moment, though, don’t be surprised if they do the incredibly foolish thing of choosing a convention.

Conventions are favored, of course, by the Christofascists and other extremists in the Virginia GOP base who seek to insure that extremist candidates who share their insane values - or who will prostitute themselves to them - get the nomination.  They want as little public involvement as possible.

Saving an American Icon

The super liner SS United States was built less than 10 miles from where I live and there are many in the area still living who worked on its construction.  To this day it holds the speed record for Atlantic crossings by an ocean liner - its top speed still unknown, but having averaged 44 miles per hour on one crossing.  Not bad for a ship 990 feet long.  Built in 1952 (the year of my birth) the United States was among the last of the great liners that once were representatives of national pride and prestige.  Now the ship lies tied up in Philadelphia- for years it languished in Norfolk where I had the opportunity to go on board -  and her fate is uncertain although there is talk of moving her to New York City for conversion into a hotel/convention venue.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the ship which should be preserved as a national symbol.  Here are excerpts:

Once upon a time, it carried princes and potentates across the Atlantic in high style and at great speed.

Then it was towed ignominiously to Ukraine where the partitions and bulkheads that once divided luxurious cabins and glittering ballrooms were torn out to remove acres of asbestos.

And since 1996, the steamship United States has been tied to a Delaware River pier beside a South Philadelphia shopping mall, while chunks of paint peel off its black hull and red-and-white funnels.

Now, the 990-foot-long ocean liner that plied the Atlantic from 1952 until 1969 is the focus of what its financially struggling owner, the SS United States Conservancy, says is a final effort to save it from the scrap yard.

Saying the ship could be only months away from being broken up, the conservancy is in talks with three developers about its potential to become a hotel, museum, shopping and restaurant mall, entertainment complex, conference center, educational facility, or some combination of all options for reuse.

Conservancy officials say the ship has about 500,000 square feet of usable space that represents both a business opportunity and a means of rescuing the historic vessel, 45 years after losing its trans-Atlantic market to commercial aviation.

Scrapping the ship would destroy a piece of American social history and an engineering landmark that still holds the record for the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing by an ocean liner, said Susan L. Gibbs, executive director of the conservancy and granddaughter of the ship’s designer, William Francis Gibbs.   “There is no other American ocean liner left,” she said in an interview. “This is the last one.”

Redevelopment is expected to cost $170 million to $300 million, depending on the combination of uses, and “seed capital” of about $15 million will be needed for an initial phase of the project, Mr. McSweeney said. Putting the ship back into the cruise market could cost as much as $1 billion, which is too expensive to contemplate, he added.

He declined to identify the potential developers but said all would move the ship to New York, its former home port, where its commercial potential would be most likely to be realized.

Mr. McSweeney said that the conservancy — which bought the ship from Norwegian Cruise Line for $3 million in 2011 — also considered locating the ship in Miami, Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia and other cities but that none matched New York.

The ship’s future may have parallels with the Rotterdam, another liner that sailed the Atlantic for Holland America Line from 1959 until 1997, and is now a mixed-used center in its home port.

After leaving service as a liner, the Rotterdam was bought by a Dutch government-backed company for 250 million euros and converted into spaces for businesses.

Since 2010, it has been occupied by shops and restaurants, a theater, a meeting center and a hotel, which together attract about 500,000 visitors a year, according to Casper van Hooren, a former investor in the project and now an adviser to the SS United States Conservancy.

Mr. van Hooren said the Rotterdam’s businesses over all are profitable, and he predicted that the liner United States would succeed as a result of New York’s many tourists.

Inside the ship, cabins once occupied by notable figures such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Harry Truman and Rita Hayworth are now marked by low dividers in the steel floor, while the ballroom where Duke Ellington once played for first-class passengers in tuxedos and ball gowns is a dimly lit shell overhung with disconnected pipes and wiring.

America routinely destroys its historic buildings and sites.  I hope the United States is saved.  If moved to New York City, we'd certainly visit it.

An Open Letter to the Extremists in the Virginia GOP

With an across the board blow out in the 2013 Virginia statewide elections, one would think that the Virginia GOP might be rethinking its priorities and what issues matter if the party seeks to regain its appeal to the majority of Virginians.  But that would be a wrong assumption given the reality that the base of the Virginia GOP is now controlled by those who can be classified as (i) crazy, (ii) white supremacists, or (iii) religious fanatics who would happily bring back a modernized version of the Spanish Inquisition.  Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin - hardly one of my favorite writers - has an open letter to the Virginia GOP in the Washington Post that holds few punches.  Rather than listen to such criticisms, I expect the Virginia GOP to double down on its batshitery.  Here are column highlights:

Hello Virginia Republican Party honchos, Bang up job there, coming up with the slate of three losing candidates in this November’s election. And it really is you — and the most ardent Republican operatives, activists and office holders – who did it. Only about 8,000 dyed-in-the-wool conservatives showed up on a weekend in May in Richmond, at least a two-hour drive for the people in the most populous part of the state (Northern Virginia). And, oddly, many Virginians on a Saturday in May were occupied with family, friends and so on. In short, people who have a life generally don’t show up at these things. So, it was a sliver of Virginians who picked the trifecta of losers.

This week, the beloved Rep. Frank Wolf — who, if it were up to those 8,000, probably never would have won 17 elections — announced that he would retire. Let me put it bluntly: If you plan on holding a convention to pick the nominee for this seat in a district populated by moderate Republicans and middle-of-the-road Democrats, you might want to consider closing up shop here in the Commonwealth. You’re just asking for it.

Interestingly, one of the aspirants for Wolf’s seat who’d probably thrill the 8,000 wound up in a wee bit of trouble this week. State Del. Dick Black apparently believes marital rape doesn’t exists.

[D]on’t give me that, “Are we going to let political correctness pick our nominee?” jazz; indifference to modern sensibilities is precisely why those 8,000 conventioneers have such a poor record in picking viable candidates.

One way to prevent a disaster like 2013 is to use a primary, not a closed club of party insiders, to pick the nominee. If you don’t believe me, sit down with former congressman and new Republican Artur Davis. He wrote in an e-mail: . . . .  “We need to stop acting as if we fear the voters who aren’t on our email chains.” Hmm. He’s got a point, no?

If instead you come up with a Saturday-in-Richmond nominee who spews fire and brimstone, I’ll be voting for the Democrat, who will be picked by a primary and, therefore, is unlikely to be obviously incapable of winning. Just saying.

 Blunt and to the point.  Will the Virginia GOP listen?  Not a chance.  The Family Foundation will demand that more lunatics and extremists be nominated, and it will once again get its way.