The Virginia GOP's Continued Circular Firing Squad

Over 20 years ago, I was elected to the Republican City Committee for Virginia Beach.  The party then was a very different organization and sane moderates were still in the majority despite efforts by Christofascists to infiltrate and hijack the party.  Now, the moderates are gone and to be in the GOP one needs to be either (i) a far right Christian extremist, (ii) an open racist, or (iii) driven by greed and a desire to deny benefits to the poor and destitute and allow the nation's infrastructure to collapse.  Not surprisingly, fewer and fewer voters in high turnout elections find the GOP agenda appealing.  Yet do those in the leadership of the Virginia GOP believe they need to change the party agenda?  Of course not.  They are such fanatical ideologues (and so beholden to the extremists at The Family Foundation) that they simply need to "be more unified."  The fact that their agenda is viewed as poisonous and that the state's demographics are changing don't register in their warped minds.  A piece in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the Virginia GOP's ongoing circular firing squad.  Here are excerpts:

Without a victory in a statewide race since 2009, the Virginia GOP would have to overcome increasingly challenging demographics to deliver the state to Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman John C. Whitbeck, elected in January to serve out the term of retiring Pat Mullins, has made it his mission to modernize the party without diluting its conservative principles.   “We don’t need to change who we are, we don’t need to reform our belief system and our platform. That’s not going to happen,” Whitbeck said in an interview.

 

The big challenge for the Virginia GOP, should it opt for a convention, is to represent the range of opinions within the party, said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington.   “From the point of view of creating a broad-based party with a lot of public support, conventions really don’t get you there,” Farnsworth said. “A few thousand people who participate in a convention are going to be far more ideologically extreme than the much larger population that would participate in a primary.”

UMW’s Farnsworth said the convention-versus-primary debate is just one indicator that the conflict within the Virginia GOP is not just a difference of opinion between candidates, but a more permanent cleavage.  "The idea that Eric Cantor was not conservative enough to win a Republican nomination is a significant departure from were the RPV stood 10 years ago,” Farnsworth said.

Whitbeck rejects the notion that a conservative candidate cannot appeal to mainstream voters.

Beyond fundraising, Virginia Republicans face another daunting numbers game. State voter turnout spikes above 70 percent in presidential elections, which maximizes Democrats’ advantage in Virginia’s increasingly diverse population centers of Northern Virginia, greater Richmond and Hampton Roads.

In 2008 Barack Obama carried Northern Virginia by 234,079 votes. He ran basically even in the rest of Virginia, winning the state by 234,527 votes.  In 2012 Obama again swept the four counties and five cities in Northern Virginia, this time by a total of 231,244 votes. Republicans improved their vote totals in rural sections of the state, but Obama still carried Virginia by more than 149,000 votes.

In 2016, if the Democratic presidential nominee — presumably former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — again comes out of Northern Virginia with a cushion of more than 200,000 votes, the Republican nominee will be hard-pressed to offset the margin.

The population centers that hold the largest segment of the state’s voters continue to grow more diverse. For instance, the state’s most populous locality — Fairfax County, with more than 1.1 million residents — was 69.9 percent white in 2000 and 63.6 percent white by 2013.  In that span the county’s Asian population rose from 13.1 percent to 18.4 percent. Its percentage of Hispanic residents rose from 11 percent to 16.2 percent.

While aware of the state’s voting patterns in recent presidential elections, Whitbeck says Virginia Republicans do not need to reconsider their message.  “It’s all about our presentation, that is the issue.

When your agenda is anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay and anti-women, its hard to see how you change your "presentation" so that the voters you attack and malign - and seek to disenfranchise - are going to vote in support of your policies.   The Kool-Aid continues to be consumed by the gallons at RVP headquarters and city and county committees across Virginia.   A form of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting somehow to achieve a different result.  Until the GOP, and especially the Virginia GOP, decides to move into the 21st century and face demographic change, I hope their losing streak continues and come the next census, many of their gerrymandered districts will dissolve.

The Virginia GOP's Fight Against Democracy

Not only does the Virginia Republican Party support a theocracy of sorts - despite the prohibitions in the U.S. Constitution against an established religion - but it is increasingly anti-democratic as reflected by its efforts to disenfranchise as many voters as possible (minorities are the favorite target) and the efforts of the Christofascists/Tea Party elements to turn nominations into coronations by a select few who support the theocratic, anti-democracy agenda.  Sadly, in the highly gerrymandered districts pushed through by the Virginia GOP, the party extremists continue to win in elections.  In statewide contests, however, Virginia's changing demographics make victory for GOP candidates increasingly elusive.  The Virginia GOP's solution?  Double down and get even more extreme.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

THE FIX was in from the start when Virginia Republicans picked their ticket for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in 2013. 

Hard-line conservatives who control the state party apparatus decreed that the nominations would be determined not by primaries but by a convention, a mechanism well suited to limit the number of participants.

In the event, just 8,000 of the Republican faithful showed up — representing perhaps half of 1 percent of the party’s sympathizers in the state — and the right-wing ticket they picked was swept in the fall by the Democrats, who held much more widely attended nominating primaries.

Virginia has not elected a Republican to any statewide position since 2009, nor has it elected one to the U.S. Senate since 2002. 
 
That string of losses has coincided with venomous internecine divisions in the Republican ranks, in which hard-liners generally have prevailed by forcing nominating conventions, most of which have yielded hard-line candidates.

Rather than rethinking that losing strategy, Virginia’s conservative activists now seem inclined to double down on it. They are pressing for the GOP to hold a convention rather than a state-run primary to choose a presidential nominee in 2016.

That move would be designed to favor more ideological candidates, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and handicap more moderate candidates, such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

In addition to giving more extreme candidates a leg up, the effect would be undemocratic. Tens of thousands of moderate Republicans — the sort of voters who might go to the polls for a primary but are unlikely to travel dozens or hundreds of miles to a convention — would be excluded.

Tens of millions of Americans might not be committed to one party or the other, but surely most would favor more participatory elections and more moderate candidates. By pressing for a process that would produce neither, hard-line Republicans are pursuing a losing strategy — not just for themselves but also for voters.

Unfortunately, the Virginia GOP is becoming akin to a insane religious cult - something not surprising given the reality that The Family Foundation for all practical purposes authors GOP policies in Virginia.  Until the Christofascists' stranglehold on the Virginia GOP is broken, expect things to become progressively worse.

Will a Civil War Break Out in the Virginia GOP?

The RPV' Base's 2013 "dream team" of extremists

Some conjecture that the Tea Party take down of Eric Cantor may be only the opening salvo of a civil war that may flare within the Republican Party of Virginia ("RPV").  Even as the Commonwealth's population trends toward more diversity and the voting power of the urban areas increase, the Christofascists and their fellows hiding under the Tea Party label are veering more and more into complete crazy land.  Some in the RVP - admitted far too few - seem to be slowly realizing that the insanity of the party base may spell the long term death knell of the party.  The spittle flecked Christofascists and Tea Party lunatics, who naturally remain detached from objective reality, in contrast claim that more "ideological purity" within the party is what will save it.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the brewing intra-party warfare.  Here are highlights:

Virginia Republicans watched and waited to see if the state party’s treasurer would resign after he publicly questioned Muslims’ contributions to society.  Some urged his ouster; others kept quiet. Finally, he agreed to step down.

The episode added to the turmoil within the state party that is making a growing number of Republicans uneasy about the GOP’s ability to elect statewide candidates or deliver Virginia for a Republican presidential candidate in 2016.

In June, a group of tea party activists, Ron Paul enthusiasts and staunch conservatives calling themselves the “conservative coalition” shocked the nation when they helped a little-known economics professor defeat former House majority leader Eric Cantor.

The fighting could come to a head Saturday when Republicans from both camps — insurgents and establishment — gather in Richmond for a meeting of the party’s governing body, the State Central Committee. The meeting comes as Democrats hold all five statewide offices and the GOP is struggling to define itself.

Officially, the committee will decide some internal issues. But unofficially, some are predicting a day-long slugfest between warring factions that haven’t faced each other since Cantor’s loss.

While a meeting full of arcane parliamentary rules might seem irrelevant to the long-term success of the party, many Republicans say the decisions of a few dozen powerful insiders will have a direct impact on the GOP’s likelihood of nominating candidates with enough mainstream appeal to win statewide elections in a changing Virginia.

Ron Butler, president of a ­direct-mail firm with ties to Cantor, was pessimistic that momentum would swing back to the establishment. “They’re acting more like the Muslim Brotherhood than the Republican Party in this country,” he said of the conservative wing of the GOP. “They scream about Eric Holder and President Obama upholding the Constitution. They’re attempting to throw their own constitution out.”

The conservative wing tried to blacklist Butler’s firm, an unprecedented move in Virginia politics that some say runs counter to the party’s free-market ideals.

With big policy issues facing the state, including Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s effort to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and a worsening state budget shortfall, some Republicans see their internal troubles as an unhelpful distraction.

The flap about the former party treasurer began July 29, when Bob FitzSimmonds posted an inflammatory comment about Muslims on Facebook. . . . Democrats seized on the FitzSimmonds controversy to cast ­Republicans as incendiary and noninclusive. The state party specifically called on Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ed Gillespie to denounce the comments, which the Democrats called “bigoted.”

At the core of the rift is a ideological clash about how candidates are nominated for elected office. The conservative coalition prefers party-run conventions that attract the most committed, conservative activists to day-long gatherings. Moderate Republicans prefer primaries, which are open to all voters in Virginia.

Last year, conservatives in crucial party leadership positions successfully pushed for a convention — and went on to nominate candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general whom Democrats, on their way to a historic sweep of all three offices, painted as too conservative.

"Too conservative" is an understatement.  Far right extremists - and in the case of Cuccinelli and Jackson, freaking insane - would be more apt.

Infighting and Swamp Fever Dominate Virginia GOP

There are those who make the cry that the Republican Party can be changed from within.  It's a claim that I do not subscribe to given the manner in which the Christofascists/Tea Party crowd, white supremacist (who more often than not are one and the same as the Christofascists/Tea Party) and no tax lunatics have been allowed to infiltrate local city and county committees all across Virginia.  Of late, a few seem to finally be realizing that these folks are like a metastasizing cancer and efforts are being made to limit the ability of the extremists and outright crazy elements on local committees and at mass meetings to drive the GOP further into crazy land and/or select committee chairs and party candidates.  A nasty civil war has ensued with those trying to limit insanity being labeled as Nazis or worse.  A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the ongoing civil war.  Here are some column excerpts:

In increasingly Democratic Henrico, Republicans more often than not speak in one voice — a reminder of the control over the party apparatus by a local boy made good: Eric Cantor, the U.S. House majority leader and could-be speaker. But because of Cantor’s adversaries — his tea party primary opponent and others disdainful of Cantor’s more traditional brand of Republicanism — the latest mass meeting, to some, seemed mass confusion.

In recent weeks, this pattern has been playing out across Virginia as factions struggle for control of a Republican Party reduced to a regional presence by a string of Democratic statewide victories. The current infighting, in which Cantor loyalists figure prominently, is a preliminary to the main event in 2016: the battle for the GOP’s governing body, the central committee. It will be concurrent with the presidential race in purple Virginia.

In suburban Virginia Beach and rural Campbell and Buckingham counties, to name a few, Republicans have engaged in the parliamentary equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.

These battles — over leadership, organization and convention delegates — can be vicious. It’s because the stakes are comparatively low: dominance of local GOP committees, many of which have few members. That’s a reflection of the changing Virginia. Democrats are attracting the young, Asians and Hispanics. The Republican base is dominated by aging whites.

The internal combat is of the Republican Party’s own making. Elective Republicans openly court libertarians, home-schoolers and property rights advocates who have flooded the party since 2010. Their muscle is institutionalized by partisan gerrymandering, which forces Republicans further right, fueling partisan impasse — most recently, in Richmond, over spending and health care.

In Henrico, anti-Establishment Republicans narrowly rejected a Cantor loyalist, county GOP chairman Don Boswell, a former sheriff, to lead the mass meeting. Instead, these activists installed an interloper from Stafford County, about 60 miles north: Russ Moulton, former 1st District Republican chairman.  No friend of Cantor, Moulton has made a name for himself training tea partyers and Paulians in Republican rules and other organizational esoterica.

This way, this crowd is becoming part of the GOP fabric. But it also is a threat to comparatively mainstream Republicans such as Cantor. He favors open-to-all primaries for choosing a nominee because they minimize the right’s influence. Moulton and Co. prefer member-only conventions because they maximize it.

As Cantor’s enemies see it, naming Moulton as temporary chairman short-circuited any effort at slating and spotlighted momentum for Dave Brat, the congressman’s remaining opponent in the June primary. Further, it raises anew a nettlesome question for Cantor: If he can’t bring his party together at home, how can he do it in Washington? But then, who can?

Fred Gruber, a tea party guy from Louisa County, is running. He’s apparently not making friends by — according to Republican blogs — comparing his foes to Nazis. That’s always risky, more so when Cantor, the dominant political figure in the Henrico-anchored 7th District, is the only Jewish Republican in Congress.

This is another instance of the personal nature of Republican Party politics, and how it is magnified by the intimacy of caucuses, conventions and committees, all of which are about preserving the power of the few. Rivalries span generations. Grudges are nursed, not forgotten. Egos must be stroked.

In Virginia Beach, the Republican mass meeting was a rumble. More than 600 people were there in an Establishment drive, dependent on slating, to wrest the party from the upstarts. It may have worked.

In Buckingham, the new Republican leader is a pastor who longtime activists said they’d not heard of until he arrived at the mass meeting at the county agriculture center Wednesday.

As I have said many times, the Republican establishment created a Frankenstein monster when it allowed in the Christofascist, Tea Party and white supremacist focusing only on short term opportunity.   Now, the monster is proving difficult to kill. 

 
 

Virginia GOP Loons Threaten "Operation Chaos"

Few spectator "sport" are more enjoyable than watching the lunatics of the GOP base go all crazy and spittle flecked as they struggle to drag the Republican Party back to Neanderthal times and ultimate political extinction.  They laud uncontrolled mob rule and the more insane one is, the more one is to be supported.  Some in the Virginia GOP - admittedly far too few - do realize that the swamp fever must be stopped.  One is Senator Frank Wagner who I have know for over 20 years - we began our political activism and involvement at about the same time initially over education issues in Virginia Beach.  The upshot is that efforts are being made to rein in the insanity afflicting the Virginia GOP and block efforts to put the Christofascists/Tea Party in complete charge.  Having been to a state GOP convention myself once upon a time (when the GOP was much less insane), conventions are NOT representative of most Republicans.  Now, with the rise of the Christofascists and Tea Party in the party base, they pack conventions and the result is the trio of crazies that got nominated in 2013 for statewide office.  All of them lost. The Mason Conservative has a piece that evidences the reaction of the crazies.  Here are highlights:

It looks like Frank Wagner's despicable slating tactic to nullify any and all participation in the state and local politics by actual conservatives is spreading.  I am hearing this could happen in the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th districts as well.  So instead of trying to work together and broaden the party, the Establishment all over Virginia has made it pretty clear that they only want either paid lackeys or bootlickers running the local committees.  So if they continue to do this, there isn't much we can do.
Or is there.

What I propose is if the Establishment here in Virginia continues to use this tactic in order to disenfranchise any person who doesn't toe the line, we vote Democrat this year.  Just this once.  Consider this Operation Chaos 2.0. If they don't want us, lets see how they will feel if vote against them?  This a free country and in my opinion, it is the duty of the party to serve its members, not the reverse.  Unfortunately, when you get into power and surround yourself with paid yes-men, you lose sight of that.

Is this a radical step?  Yes.  Will this idea catch on?  I hope so.  Primaries are pointless if the system is gamed.  The reason why people like Frank Wagner and his ilk hate conventions is because it is a system that he cannot game, cannot control, cannot dictate the outcome just because he's a state senator.  For all the bullshit they spew about growing the party through primaries, let's see them eat those words when they have effectively thrown out the activist base that does all the hard work and actually believes in what fake conservatives like Wagner et al say they believe in.

They think we are patsies.  They think we can be bullied and put down and beaten into line.  But parties are overrated, they are simply vehicles for getting elected to enact your principles.  What is in your heart is more important then the letter after your name on the ballot.  If they want to play dirty, let's play dirtier.

Let's see 2nd District Chairman Wagner explain why Scott Rigell lost reelection.  Now THAT would be fun to watch ...

Personally, I support Frank Wagner's efforts.  Something must be done to end the swamp fever.  And if the lunatics do go forward with "Operation Chaos," it would be a good thing for Virginia and perhaps permanently discredit these nutcases.