As the GOP's race-baiting staple--the Southern Strategy--completes its natural evaporation, Republicans in the throes of an epic identity crisis are turning their knives on each other. While the GOP searches for a chairperson to help guide their party's disintegration over the next eight years, Republican-on-Republican skirmishes are breaking out across the country as right-wing partisans follow the lead set by their Presidential standard-bearers, McCain-Palin.
In Florida, Bush 41's other spawn has the local newspapers rumbling about a Crist-Jeb feud.
According to the Sarasota Herald Tribune, the alleged rivalry ignited as follows:
That supposed feud first took root in 2006 when Bush was perceived to have done little to help Crist win his election. That following January Crist canceled 283 of Jeb Bush’s final appointments to various boards and commissions.
The article goes on to quote a Red State blogger, which is a refreshing relief from the press's reliance on dailykos diarists for material:
"Charlie Crist has been on a roll lately undermining conservatives. Behind the scenes, he is trying to drum up opposition to Jeb Bush’s Senate run, not because he doesn’t want another Bush, but because he wants a more moderate candidate."
Whatever you're doing Charlie, I say keep up the good work!
Further west in Nevada, the Republican Governor and Lt. Governor are at each others throats in a very public manner over the Lt. Governor's recent trip to China. Brian Krolicki, the Lt. Governor and a potential opponent of Harry Reid in 2010, weakly objected to the Governor Jim Gibbons' accusations that he turned a state-sponsored trip to promote tourism into a personal escapade:
Krolicki on Saturday defended the 10-day trip he took in June with 14 Nevada business leaders, saying no taxpayer dollars were involved.
"My work ethic couldn't have been any stronger," he told The Associated Press. "It was a trip filled with work, but certainly there was an opportunity to grab a present for a child or look at Chinese architecture. You're going to do a little of that as well."
Krolicki declined to provide a copy of the trip itinerary.
A local political scientist remarks on how the intra-party kerffufle flatters the GOP's image:
Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said the flap hurts both Gibbons and Krolicki as well as the GOP.
"It doesn't make either one of them look good," he said. "I can't figure out why the governor went after Brian Krolicki. The Republican Party is fractured in so many ways and this adds a new fault line."
In Iowa, Republicans vying for the job of state party chairman do agree on one thing: the party can't agree on an identity. Local party officials mulled everything from a lack of technological savvy to the absence of a grass roots in an effort to explain their total inability to deliver a message. One of the state party's brightest stars offered this brilliant display of tone-deaf stupidity:
Paul Pate, a former secretary of state and past mayor of Cedar Rapids, called on the party to develop a message that goes beyond characterizing Democrats as politicians who favor higher taxes.
"Let's go a step further, and let's talk about how dumb they are in spending that money," he said. "People hear it all the time: 'Democrats spend more money.' Well, it doesn't mean anything. People are getting desensitized to it ... What we have to do as a party is come up with that sound bite. That's what it comes down to: What is the sound bite for '09 and 2010?"
Good luck regurgitating that message! In West Virginia, Republican officials refused to be out-cluelessed by their Iowan counterparts, as evidence by the remarks of another one of the party's great philosophers:
Another local Republican candidate agrees the state needs more political diversity, but he doesn't see it being achieved any time soon.
"We're done - put a fork in it," former Delegate Chris Wakim, R-Ohio, said of the state GOP. Wakim lost last month in his attempt to win a state Senate seat.
"The state is 20 years behind the times," he noted. "I don't have a lot of faith in the socialistic bent of Barack Obama, and I think after a couple of years the rest of the country will go back to a more conservative government. But West Virginia won't."
From East to West, the GOP is a party plagued by infighting and impotence. In Snohomish County, Washington, where the local Republicans earned fame during the election for peddling three-dollar bills that depicted the then Democratic nominee in a headdress, the GOP is a party without a base. The local paper details the uniquely Republican tale of lahooserism:
This is a party ridiculed in 2007 for running a professional magician for county executive and embarrassed in 2008 by selling $3 bills depicting Barack Obama in Arab headdress at the state fair.
It also had to recover this year from getting silenced when hackers knocked out its Web site in the heat of the fall campaign.
Those woes simply compounded the difficulties the party has encountered the last four years in recruiting candidates, raising money, reaching voters and winning elections.
Republicans and the Republican Party have seen their voice quieted and influence eroded in a county increasingly controlled by Democrats.