This weekend a very important bellweather for the McCain Presidential campaign will sound: the election of a new Arizona GOP Chairman.
Lisa James is widely regarded as the means by which McCain will cement his control over the Arizona GOP and lock down his home state, the loss of which in the preference primary would be a potentially fatal embarrassment to his candidacy. If James wins the Chairmanship, then the party ‘establishment’ will have successfully imposed its will on the ‘base’. The realists will have defeated the movement in a tangible way that will set the course for the 2008 race in Arizona, and for the party’s future in Arizona. The party of Lisa James will be a much different beast that the party of Randy Pullen.
If Pullen wins, he’s unlikely to carry any particular Presidential candidate’s water, except perhaps Tom Tancredo. If Pullen wins, the Arizona party will be much less likely to toe the national line and take bi-partisan compromise positions on key issues of concern to the base. If Pullen wins the focus of the party will shift decisively from the country clubs and boardrooms to rural Arizona and communities of faith.
If James wins, its a vote by the party’s state committeemen to stay the course, take more of the same, and, most importantly, for John McCain for GOP nominee. Given that the elected PCs of Maricopa County recently slapped McCain down in a straw poll with a 4th place finish, I have to say it seems unlikely that the Party’s state committeemen will choose James, no matter what the party’s establishment and elected officials are urging.
At the recent equivalent Democratic Party organizing meeting, Democratic state committeemen overwhelmingly voted to stay the course by electing appointed incumbent state Chairman David Waid with roughly 85% of the vote: a resounding vote of confidence in the current direction of the Party. But Democrats just won resounding victories in Arizona, taking new state and federal legislative seats and re-electing all our state-wide officers, signaling a party of the rise and the right track. Republicans, on the other hand, just suffered a major and dispiriting defeat. A lot of Republican foot soldiers have to be questioning the wisdom of their current crop of generals after having their asses handed to them so emphatically. Will they see Lisa James with her long list of eminent, top-tier endorsements, her slick GOP establishment credentials, and her ties to McCain’s fortunes, as more of the same failed Party leadership?
I really don’t know, but I sure would like to hear from Republicans who do.
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I understand now. You have no standards of ratiocination so you are free to lie and distort all you want. How convenient.
Mark, why do you hate America?
I find hilarious how the Right so often requires rigorous adherence to some lofty standard of ratiocination when addressing their own bullshit, but have no problem just dismissing as bullshit anything said by a liberal.
I think GG’s premises are bullshit. I said why I think that. Accept it or don’t.
Obviously you don’t and, frankly, I’m not at all surprised that you are predisposed not to accept any views other than those you already hold.
Michael,
This is your blog, yes? I read your response to G.G. I am curious, why did you feel the need to distort her comments? Why are you incapable of debating her points? Why do you embrace sophism?
So McCain offers a job that isn’t his to give to a man who doesn’t want it and that’s proof that little Lisa is not in the great man’s pocket? Pullen fails to criticize McCain by name, but trashes a bill everyone knows McCain is a primary sponsor of, and that’s proof that Pullen is McCain’s lapdog? Wow. All I can say is, Wow.
Once again, the beating drum of “Lisa James is McCain’s pick for Chairman” and once again, not a scintilla of evidence. The Pullen partisans are trying to make this an election all about McCain, which is why they have tried to tie Lisa James to McCain at every turn. The facts just don’t bear out. McCain asked Len Munsil to run for Chairman (see http://www.lenmunsil.com) and he ultimately declined. Lisa James was already a candidate when Munsil bowed out, so that, in and of itself, shows that James is not the McCain pick. As you Dems certainly know, McCain has a long memory and can have a nasty vindictive streak. Lisa James ran Bush’s primary campaign in AZ in 2000… not a way to score points with the home-town Senator.
Pullen on the other hand has usually left McCain alone when he criticizes the Bush immigration stance. A couple years ago he wrote in an op-ed that Bush and Rep. Jeff Flake had “willfully misled the American people” in thier defense of their immigration bill by saying it wasn’t amnesty. Why did Pullen leave McCain out of the piece when it was McCain’s bill that he had the beef with? Don’t be surprised if Pullen and McCain have some kind of deal cut.