The Republican party here in Minnesota decided to kick their Governor around a bit.
GOP dumps Eibensteiner for Shoreview businessman
The Minnesota Republican Party on Saturday rejected the personally delivered advice of Gov. Tim Pawlenty not to "switch horses in the middle of the stream" and dumped Ron Eibensteiner, its chairman and a Pawlenty ally, for Ron Carey, a Shoreview businessman and party secretary-treasurer.
What was Eibensteiner's crime? Why were people miffed at him?
He is a proponent of gambling. Actually he's another crony capitalist. He has investments in a company that sells slot machines, so he's been pushing the state to let people install slots at the horse racing track. So the religious conservatives, they didn't like that. In a strange turn, they've now gotten a bit of religion and are against gambling. Which is odd, since the party has largely supported it in the past as a way to raise revenues without raising taxes.
But there's more going on here.
The Governor has been trying to triangulate. He's pledged not to raise taxes, but he's very vulnerable to attacks that he's a miserly old scrooge. In 2004, the DFL was able to oust over a dozen Republican state representatives because they'd all been opposing increased funding of transportation. So now the Governor has started talking about trains and other things, to show he's not a meanie.
But the GOP, they don't much like that. They want him to be ideologically pure. They're mad that they lost seats, but they insist it was because they weren't mean enough.
The classic quote comes from this MPR article.
"If the position of the Republican Party is we're going to have no increase in school funding, draconian cuts to health care more so than we've had and we're not going to hold the wealthy tribes accountable in a system where they get a pretty good deal, then I think the public is going to ask some other questions that aren't going to help our chances of success as a party," Pawlenty said.
This provides a real opportunity to the DFL in the 2006 elections.