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It has been 48 hours and no one has been fired. The Pauline Kaels of the GOP Remain in Charge.

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  November 2nd, 2009 at 08:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

On Friday, when Dede Scozzafava dropped out of NY-23, she said she hoped to work toward a “stronger GOP.”

Yesterday, word began to break that Scozzafava and her husband are working with union activists to push her voters toward Bill Owens, the Democrat.

I guess for Scozzafava, a stronger GOP means one in which the Democrat wins.

It has been 48 hours since Dede Scozzafava dropped out of NY-23.

After $900,000.00 wasted on her candidacy by the GOP, the candidate is now returning the support by encouraging votes for the Democrat.

In the old days, when disgracing your employer, your co-worker, or screwing up your job, you either quit on your own accord or jumped out a window to your death. There was a quiet dignity that came with resignation in the face of defeat.

That is not happening with the NRCC. The people whose judgment has fractured the GOP and inspired scores of third party candidates and primary challengers for the GOP remain in place still calling the shots.

How can we trust them to get it right now? With no accountability comes a failure to take responsibility. And if they will not take responsibility, we must continue to question their judgment.

It is unfortunate because candidate recruitment and fundraising have gone well. But all that has to be overshadowed by an unwillingness to take responsibility for NY-23. The failure to take responsibility led the GOP off the cliff and out of power in 2006.

Vigilance and accountability must be imposed from the outside if they will not impose them from the inside.

I had intended to start a daily reminder that Pete Sessions and Guy Harrison remain on the job and should be fired. They wasted $900,000.00 on a “Republican” who dropped out and endorsed the Democrat.

If Pete Sessions and Guy Harrison have such little respect for donor money in this race, how can we trust them in other races. After all, except for the Pauline Kaels of the Beltway GOP, it was abundantly obvious to everyone else that Dede Scozzafava was not a moderate, but a Democratic leftist.

Sadly, I don’t have the time. There are bigger fish to fry. I do think either or both Sessions and Harrison must be fired if they will not resign. Dignity and common decency demand it.

They seem to have none though and there are only so many fronts on which we can fight. So we will remember this, but we will choose to fight another day.

After all, we did win. But if I were a Republican Congressman, I’d be hacked off by the malpractice at the NRCC.

*Kael, by the way, was the New York Times writer who commented that she was stunned by Richard Nixon’s election because she knew absolutely no one who had voted for him.

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  • NeoKong

    Scozzafava can only betray the party once. She has revealed herself as the back stabber she is and cannot harm the GOP anymore.
    Her endorsement to Owens was like the kiss of death as Hoffman now has a healthy lead. Her career is over.
    You have helped show the NRCC Erick that if they cannot lead that there are many willing to step up to the plate.
    Heckuva job.

  • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

    Newt should go away, forever.

  • Ausonius

    “Pauline Kael?”

    For those who are too young to remember, or who did not follow NY city movie reviewers, Pauline Kael was the battleship who sank movies, sometimes before they opened, or protected and promoted them, even if they were demonstrably awful (Last Tango In Paris being one that sticks in the memory: really who wanted to see the paunchy aging mumbling Brando rolling around in a bed with a girl his daughter’s age, or would consider it art?)

    I will assume that Mr. Erickson’s reference here is to the latter situation: protecting and P r o m o t i n g a demonstrably awful candidate! :)

  • The_Gadfly

    not being familiar with her or Last Tango I went to wiki for the pop overview. Wow, even that left a horrid taste.

  • David_Rasbold

    Called NRSC and told them to remove me from their mailing lists and they won’t get a dime of support from me this year or next. The only way they get the message, sadly, is if the coffers run dryer. I’ve since been contacted twice by them and have ignored their phone call each time. Helps to have been a contributor in the past – when they know you’re not just complaining but will withhold your typical yearly donation.

    I told them on the original call when asking to be removed from lists that I will give money to local candidates or to candidates directly, but no longer to a party apparatus that so blindly and ignorantly spends our money and throws support behind a person like Dede.

    I’m not against running more moderate candidates in those races where it is absolutely necessary. But I’ll tell you right now, these “moderates” need to understand something real fast. They can exist because of the base and conservatives. It doesn’t happen the other way around. If they want to be aboard the conservative train toward a 2010 wave, then they must be committed to our core princples of limited gov’t and fiscal responsibility. I would love to have all of the moderates agree on social issues, but not even all conservatives agree on the social issues.

    However, a person that WILL fight for and implement limited gov’t practices intimates one that is for federalism, less gov’t involvement, and gov’t sticking to that which the constitution laid out for it. Something for which liberals supposedly support, but actively work against and relish in the effort. It is at the core of who they are: they (i.e., gov’t) know best how to live your life for you and want to control/motivate/penalize behaviors as such.

    A GOP leadership unwilling to even source candidates in light red/purple/blue districts that at the very least hold strong to these elements is a leadership that doesn’t deserve our support. At best they deserve our scorn and our effort in turning them out in favor of new leadership.

  • The_Gadfly

    wouldn’t be nearly so upset. What hacks me off is they very nearly lost what SHOULD have been an easy Republican win. If Hoffman weren’t running, there is no way she would have beaten the Dem. As is, we’re not out of the woods yet. That kind of monumental incompetence is the sort of thing that use to get generals shot after court martial.

    *Yeah, the wasteful ways of Congress have successfully defined my definition of deviance so far down the raw number doesn’t really irritate me.

  • mbecker908

    She’ll be the poster child for victims of the vast right wing conspiracy. She’ll run as a D next time out and most likely win going away (for her State seat). Hopefully she can be conned into running in ’10 as a D. Hoffman should beat her handily.

  • Ausonius

    Since we are reminiscing here, 50 years ago there was a real character, a man with character as well: Republican Everett Dirksen of Illinois. He sounded like a dying jet engine, but what he said provided a foundation for conservatism in the post-WW II era.

    An example of relevance here to “only $900,000″:

    “A hundred million dollars, Mr. President, is only a “drop in the bucket.” I grew up at a time when on Sunday, if I had been a good boy for the whole week, my mother gave me a penny and said to me, “My son, don’t spend it all in one place.”

    We have come a long way from then. The classic example is here tonight, when the Senator from Colorado says a hundred million dollars is “a drop in the bucket.”

    No wonder we are nursing a $295 billion debt.”

    [Congressional Record, June 8, 1961, p.9896]

    $295 Billion! Today that IS a drop in the bucket!

  • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

    You don’t have to buy into wild-eyed conspiracy theories to understand the vast majority of RINO’s are functionally leftist sleeper agents. Their only purpose is to hold onto Republican seats by claiming to be Republicans and then dumping their support to leftwing causes in clutch moments.
    By holding official “R” tie pins they have the safest seats in the Democrat party.
    If Olympia Snowe does ever get beat by a Dem; who wins? Dems. If she never gets beat by a Dem who wins? Dems. Republicans have no way to win in Maine until Snowe is beaten in the primary or general election.
    Barring a major screwup, she will probably never lose a primary.
    It is plain on it’s face the only way an actual Republican can ever win in Maine is probably to have a Dem serve at least one term.

    Of course the thought sucks but you are merely fooling yourself if you think a Dem doesn’t hold the seat already.

    I don’t mean anybody should work for a Dem unless by some wild chance they were a good one. But we can certainly withhold support from her and NRSC type groups that support her.

    Sometimes you just have to take your medicine.

    And yes Scozzafava ties in here because like Snowe and McCain her endorsement is merely an act of flipping her hole card and showing her whole hand.
    We already knew she wasn’t holding aces; now we know she is just another four flusher.

    McCain did it with McCain-Feingold and immigration reform. Snowe most recently did it with Hellthcare.

  • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

    I think the better course is to count on the punsihment of such utter embarrassment in NY to have taught Steele, Cornyn and Sessions a lesson and leave them in their posts. Much like many drug defendants I have had. The ones that seem to do best are the ones that spend a short time in jail rather than long term training to be career criminal!

  • http://www.erickerickson.org Erick Erickson

    Kael is the New York Times writer who said she was surprised Nixon won because she did not know anyone who voted for him.

  • Bobcat51

    walking into your place of employment today after the bosses have just discovered you stuffed up and lost 900.000 dollars of company money ?

    Your feet wouldn’t touch the ground on the way out to the door ?

  • banzaibob

    and I keep telling them no. This is the reason why I contribute directly to the candiddate instead of the GOP.

  • frat

    is this idea floating through the media of Republicans not being “inclusive.” The idea is that if one does not believe in abortion or same sex marriage, then he is an extremist and out of touch with the mainstream. So, those who advocate taking an innocent, defenseless human life are moderate, while those who are opposed to that are extreme? How absurd is that?

    But, instead of making this point, good old Steele defends the Party as being “inclusive.”

    I have no problem with Giulianni or other pro-abortion types being in the Party, but by no means do I consider the pro- life people extreme. And, this point needs to be made.

  • Read Chesterton

    But trust works the other way around.

  • Castor

    As I stated in a previous post Scozzafava was not even a RINO.She was a DIRC(Democrat in Republican Clothing).
    It was so easy to see that I can?t imagine how Sessions and Steele were hoodwinked or even worse they knew and pretended not to be.
    There are places where the Republican party can only win with people like Mike Castle and Ron Kirk, but in no place should anyone like Scozzafava be allowed to run for anything under the GOP label.
    I like to think that if Ken Blackwell was chairman instead of Michael Steele we would not have had to go through this.
    Come to think of it why don?t we replace Michael with Ken now?

  • AceInTX

    when they could have attacked the Democrats and let the voters decide between the Republican Nominee and the Conservative who had said he’d run in 2010 as a Republican…

    That’s what’s outragious…when many of us have gone through a year plus of accusations that we’d rather elect a Democrat instead of supporting moderates and squishes when the evidence shows Conservatives by and large are far more loyal to the party than the squishes and moderates…we have the party actively supporting the Democrats by attacking the only non Democrat who could win while allowing the Dem to walk through untouched!

  • RedInABleuState
  • shadowtax

    do you seriously believe that the pink slips would be handed out days before a special election? I think that you have your priorities out of order. There will be time enough for an accounting after the election.

    Is it common practice for parties to shake up leadership just days before an election? I understand that what Scozzafava did is scandalous, but I do not believe it is criminal. Has a party shake up ever happened on the eve of an election? Ever?

    I would wait until after the election results are in. At that point we can judge performance. Before we axe the leadership, I’d like to know who will replace them, who got it right.

    Are you worried that if there is a GOP landslide that nobody will lose their jobs? I’m not.

  • Read Chesterton

    How many stealth democrats are out there running for – or sitting in – Republican seats. Extraordinary times create extraordinary circumstances. Arlen Specter was forced out of the closet. Lindsay Graham ain’t lookin’ too comfortable in his Republican pants right now… will he be next?

    Anyone who lives in a Blue state, or any large urban district, knows that the typical Republican candidates either go through the motions of running against the D establishment and then go back in their hole ’til the next election cycle, or they are are simply D’s running as R’s. The status quo of this multi-headed beast must be addressed. More Scozzafazza’s must be rooted out and sent packing. But to accomplish this, there must be leadership with the will to do this.

    Let’s start with taking away Michael Steel’s office and company credit card. If Newt wants to be a moderate, let’s tell him to go be a moderate Democrat.

  • AceInTX
  • http://cooperscopy.blogspot.com/ cooperscopy

    Remember Newt said it’s better to vote for a moderate republican than split the ticket by voting for Hoffman and then elect the democrat. Well, Newt, I guess you forgot the the republican was a democrat, and probably more liberal than Owens, and we see where her loyalties lie. She’s like Palin and Pawlenty, conservatives first republicans second. Only difference Scozzafava is a liberal first a democrat second and a republican third….

  • Aaron Gardner

    A truly awful thing indeed. ;^)

  • redneck_hippie

    must mean the politics of addition. Excuse me for my jocularity.

  • Achance

    And, they’re how we lost the majority. There hasn’t been any groundswell of changing opinion in the res publica. They were tired of GWB and had bought off on Democrat propaganda about Republican governance, so the Presidency may well have been unwinnable no matter who ran with an R behind his/her name. That said, below the Presidency, what changed was two things; 1) a huge amount of Democrat and D-Front money at all levels, and 2) strong recruitment of “moderate” or “conservative” Democrats to run against Republican incumbents or for open R seats. These people sounded like a Republican, many sounded more like a Republican than the Republican did. The Republican ideas still resonated with the voters, still do, but this is where the propaganda paid off; the brand was so tarnished that the people who didn’t want to vote for a Republican could vote for somebody who sounded just like one but who was a Democrat.

    Instead of the orgy of self-flagellation going on right now, we should be figuring out how to oust all those Democrats who campaigned like Republicans in ’06 and ’08 and now vote in lockstep with the communists.

  • redneck_hippie
  • danasdaddy
  • Read Chesterton

    These people sounded like a Republican, many sounded more like a Republican than the Republican did.

    In New Jersey, Democrats don’t have to be afraid to be Democrats. I mean, I’ve lost count of the number of time Corzine has hosted Obama during his campaign. The kiss of death for any NJ republican statewide candidate is to be labeled “Conservative” – it will lose him the endorsement of the NJ GOP faster than an arrest record.

  • caindependent

    The RNCC “leadership” must go.

    What a bunch of corrupt, stupid, stubborn, visionless, conniving bunch of political bureaucrats getting fat while further destroying what is supposed to be the “opposition party”.

    Q: What is Sessions & co being paid for?

    A: To conspire to give a million dollars to a leftist professional politician who takes her marching orders from the White House and unions and defeat the successful private CPA with fiscally conservative values and no ACORN connections.

    Great move GOP. Brilliant.

    Conspiring together with Rahm & the White House & the unions (did I mention NEWT yet?) you attempted to destroy the only decent canidate in the race.

    Can’t wait to see what Obama’s third or fourth term brings us with idiots like this steering the “opposition” ship.

    Ship of fools filled with vain pols with no character, just a yen for money and influence.

    Newt Gingrich is the prime example of why Americans and conservatives are so disgusted with the Republican party. Sessions, Dole, Graham…..all just fiddling away while Rome burns by the light of Hope n Change.

    It’s getting to be tar n feathers time for the average American whose common sense values seem to be totally absent from the Republican party as a machine. The bright spots with R next to their name in Washington seem few & far between.

    What a bunch of bumbling idiots we have to protect the public from the Dems madness.

  • Alberta

    And with all due respect to GC, Im not sure that the reptilian career pols and operatives like Steele, Cornyn and Sessions are even capable of the human emotion of ‘embarrassment’. Such creatures feed on power, and the best way to bring them to heel, in my opinion, would be to starve them for a little while.

  • AceInTX

    A said we were heading toward the next “faze” in something or other the other day to Leon’s amusment

  • AceInTX
  • http://www.AmericanThinker.com Hammer2008

    the NRCC and RNC are hedging that their positions are MORE important than winning back the House in 2010.

  • Third Street

    a href=”http://www.redstate.com/erick/2009/11/01/it-has-been-24-hours-and-pete-sessions-still-remains-chairman-of-the-nrcc/#comment-39144″>But I stand by this position.

    I’d love for a lot of heads to roll at the NRCC. My concerns are: 1.) the corruption in the national party apparatus that made the Scozzafava debacle possible runs so deep that I don’t know with whom the people responsible could be replaced; 2.) with that in mind, I think we’re already too deep into the election cycle to start the heads rolling now; and 3.) Sessions’ NRCC has gotten excellent results in the crucial area of candidate recruiting, putting us in the game for the first time in quite a while; and we need to take full advantage of that. Unlike the last two cycles, we’re in the game, with the Sessions NRCC seeing to it we actually have strong candidates to capitalize on the building anti-Democrat environment.

    There’s still more of that recruiting to do, and if we win big in tomorrow’s elections (and I think we have great odds of sweeping all three big ones) it will probably spur even greater interest among potential candidates. So I say, let the people at the NRCC who have demonstrated success at finding good candidates keep doing it, vet everybody they dig up and be certain no more Scozzafavas are allowed to get through; send the organization no money and let those particular chips fall where they may as a consequence of the mistrust the NRCC has earned, and fumigate the place as soon as 2010 is under our belts.

  • Third Street
  • smagar

    Before we axe the leadership, I?d like to know who will replace them, who got it right.

  • smagar

    Sessions? NRCC has gotten excellent results in the crucial area of candidate recruiting, putting us in the game for the first time in quite a while; and we need to take full advantage of that. Unlike the last two cycles, we?re in the game, with the Sessions NRCC seeing to it we actually have strong candidates to capitalize on the building anti-Democrat environment.

    Exactly.

    vet everybody they dig up

    We already have a procedure for this in most states—the primaries and caucuses. If you don’t like Sessions’ candidates—fine. Replace them with ones of your own.

  • mbecker908

    the NY23 experience has any impact on Cornyn, Sessions, etal. We should get some feedback by end of day tomorrow and then all we have to do is watch FL.

    I do think your analogy is right on the money. The problem with it is that the “training school” in this case is Metro DC and all of these jerks have been there way too long and have completed their career training.