GOP rallies behind McInnis for Colorado governor
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TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW…
I’m told this is the best campaign ad on television: [Tom Kean Jr.]
HE COULD SELL YOU A BOTTLE OF WATER…
Newly elected New Jersey CR State Chairman Frank Luna—a rising star.
LUNA WINS IN NEW JERSEY
Frank Luna was elected New Jersey CR state chairman earlier today.
TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW, NEW JERSEY…
Lauren Bannworth, a junior at Stockton College, was appointed vice chairman of the New Jersey College Republicans by its eboard last night. She replaces Cassandra Cavanaugh who moved to Pennsylvania.
TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW…
The subject on some New Jersey CR mind’s (other than the return of Tony Soprano in March) is the election for state chairman this spring. The name Frank Luna continues to be whispered as the front-runner candidate—that is if he decides to run. Sitting State Chairman Garrett Brooks is not seeking re-election.
Luna, which means “moon” in Latin, has remained quiet about his “possible” candidacy, however many insiders say he’s “ready to run.” Once again, to fall victim to the cliche, only time will tell.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS:
OPERATION GARDEN STATE
FORRESTER CAMPAIGN FOOTS BILL
CRNC STILL UNABLE TO PROVIDE PROMISED RESOURCES
In yet another bold move to display inadequacy, CRNC Chairman Paul Gourley did about as much in New Jersey as he does every day: eat, drink, and be useless.
Reports indicate that Paul arrived late Friday, drank to his heart’s content (can anyone say: Chris Tiedeman and a trophy), was too hungover Saturday morning to do anything, and then just left.
How metaphorical. Drunk, hungover, and absent. Behold the slogan for Gourley ‘09.
For all those Gourley lovers (having this read to you before nap-time), the CRNC was yet again unable to pay for near anything. The buses were paid for by the Forrester campaign, Paul still hasn’t provided the second field rep promised during the campaign, and all the block grant money Paul offered? Pissed away on Paul’s salary.
The efforts of volunteers should not be demeaned; in fact, I’d like to take the time and applaud every CR who turned out this election season. However, mobilizing volunteers and having to rely on state feds to do your work for you is really poor form, Paul and Dan.
This is why the more rational (and literate) among us insist that the organization be controlled more by the states and not the fat idiots in DC. If they’re going to have to do the leg-work, then they should have control too.
On a lighter note,
A very deserved salute to Mike Miltenberger and the Massachusetts Fed for having “the best looking girls this weekend” in New Jersey. Good form.
ratwood@truthcaucus.com//TCRyanAtwood on AIM, 24/7
AFTERNOON POLL FIX
As political polls are more addictive than high grade cocaine (and cough syrup), here you go:
New Jersey Gubernatorial:
Corzine (Dem.) 50 (48)
Forrester (Rep.) 43 (44)
Pennsylvania U.S. Senate Race:
Santorum (Rep.) 36 (38)
Casey (Dem.) 52 (52)
Pennsylvania Republican Gubernatorial Primary:
Swann (Rep.) 38 (39)
Scranton (Rep.) 31 (30)
Piccola (Rep.) 15 (10)
JERSEY CANDIDATES SPEND LIKE DRUNKEN SAILORS
Wouldn’t you think that New Jersey residents want a Governor who has financial restraint (not that ANY politician has that quality in this era)?
Instead, they don’t have much of a choice seeing that both candidates spend like there are two girls poll dancing on the bar and it’s midnight in Vegas.
The Associated Press writes: “The two millionaires vying to be New Jersey’s next governor have used a combined $45 million of their personal fortunes for their campaigns, making it the most expensive gubernatorial race in state history.”
It’s only the Trenton Governor’s Mansion. If you want real power, buy the Yankees.
NEW JERSEY POLL RETREAT
Just in case you’re not tired of polls that mean everything and nothing at the same time, here’s a new one out of New Jersey:
Corzine (Dem) 48
Forrester (Rep) 40
[Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Poll]
DOWN THE STRETCH THEY COME…
NEW JERSEY GOV. RACE DEAD HEAT
Proving that money can’t always buy you an election, a new Marist poll:
Doug Forrester 43, Jon Corzine 44
GARDEN STATE CORRECTION
It wasn’t CRNC Chairman Bill Spadea who was the original signator of the RDI contract (he just got the CRNC defunded and then publically voted for Howard Phillips). (More on Spadea pasted below).
Early 90s-era CRNC Chairman, Tony Zagotta (closeted then, openly gay now), was its original creator.
A friend at the Washington Post (guess who?) sent us this article on Spadea from the WP archives:
Copyright 1995 The Washington Post
The Washington Post
February 16, 1995, Thursday, Final Edition
SECTION: Style; Pg. D01
LENGTH: 1214 words
HEADLINE: The College Republican’s Rebel Yell; GOP Gives Group the Boot For Straying Over Party Line
BYLINE: Lloyd Grove, Washington Post Staff Writer
BODY:
Bill Spadea says he’s heard of the principle that he who takes the king’s coin sings the king’s tune. It’s a simple concept, a cliche really, that applies equally to life and commerce.
“Not if the king is wrong,” Spadea insists. “And the king is wrong this time.”
The “king” is Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour, the man credited with choreographing November’s GOP landslide. Spadea, a mere baronet, is a 25-year-old lance corporal in the Marine Corps Reserves who happens to be chairman of the College Republican National Committee—an official auxiliary of the RNC claiming a membership of 40,000 student activists on 800 campuses nationwide. About three weeks ago, Barbour unceremoniously evicted Spadea and his tiny staff from their offices on Capitol Hill and cut off their phones, salaries and health insurance—financial support amounting to $ 120,000 annually.
“There is an ideological war going on for the soul of the party,” Spadea says, by way of interpreting Barbour’s act, which came after months of skirmishing between the satellite group and RNC headquarters over the contents of the College Republicans’ (“CRs,” as they call themselves) official bimonthly newspaper, the Broadside. Barbour, who told Spadea in a Jan. 26 letter that he was pulling the plug because of “the recent and continuing irresponsible conduct . . . under your leadership,” didn’t return phone calls seeking comment for this story. “I’m sure that Haley views me as a loudmouth who is out of control, a non-team player and a radical,” says Spadea, whose 102-year-old organization traditionally recruits college kids to Republican campaigns.
He is a presentable young man whose European-cut suit hangs just so off his muscular frame. He smiles winningly, radiating self-confidence and a hint of cockiness, as he receives a reporter in the CRs’ new digs. It’s a cramped, dingy, box-strewn space in a strip mall in Vienna, and was provided on short notice by conservative gadfly Howard Phillips. Phillips’s article in the December 1994 Broadside, calling for the formation of a third party, was the last in a series of CR infractions that provoked Barbour & Co. to action.
“This was a no-brainer,” says Scott Reed, who was the RNC’s executive director until he recently accepted a job as Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s presidential campaign manager. “The bottom line is that we, the RNC, my old hat, are not going to be funding an auxiliary that is out promoting the starting of a third party. There was another Broadside that trashed Reagan and Bush in a separate little box [a paid ad from Phillips’s U.S. Taxpayers Alliance]. It’s crazy.”
But Spadea prefers to cast the dispute in cosmic, ideological terms.
“How conservative is the Republican Party going to be?” he demands with a flourish. “Haley Barbour wants the country to believe—and, first of all, wants Republicans to believe—that the battle does not exist: that pro-life and pro-choice can exist under the ‘big tent.’ And while he’s doing that, he’s pushing the conservatives out of the party and promoting the liberals within the party.” “Liberals,” to Spadea, are officeholders such as Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, California Gov. Pete Wilson and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman—all anathema to the Republican right.
“The party has to speak with one voice, no question about it,” Spadea continues. “But the party has already spoken in its 1992 platform and it’s overwhelmingly pro-life, pro-gun, anti-federal government, against gay rights, against quotas. In the 1994 election, the party spoke overwhelmingly in favor of conservative ideas. And now, all of a sudden, the national leadership has decided, ‘Well, we’ve won, let’s move to the center.’ And they’re not articulating the ideas that the Republican Party actually stands for. It happened with George Bush, and it’s happening again.”
Spadea still sits on the RNC’s 44-member executive committee despite his new status as a pariah. But since Feb. 1, he says he’s done without his paycheck ($ 40,000 annually) on which he and his new wife, Jodi, have been living in upper Georgetown. He says he hopes that a $ 250-a-plate breakfast at the Capitol Hill Club March 15 featuring House Speaker Newt Gingrich, as well as solicitations by Response Dynamics Inc., a Virginia-based Republican direct-mail firm, will pick up some of the financial slack. The $ 120,000 withdrawn by the RNC, he says, accounted for 60 percent of the College Republicans’ operating budget. He says the Broadside had been supported by advertising and not the RNC.
After Spadea was elected national chairman of the College Republicans in July 1993, with a few hundred state chairmen and delegates voting, he immediately commenced stepping on toes. A 1991 graduate of Boston University who led the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, he did an active-duty stint in the Marines, at Parris Island, S.C., and Fort Sill, Okla., becoming national youth director of Bush’s 1992 presidential campaign. Spadea, who grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., “yelling and shouting” over the family dinner table, tangled early on with a host of fellow Republicans.
“I was told specifically, ‘You’re not a team player,’ ” Spadea recalls. “This was by Scott Reed. And I said, ‘Well, define team.’ What’s the team here? As far as I’m concerned, the team means the grass-roots activists and average blue-collar regular people. . . . His response was something like, ‘You better shape up or we’re gonna come down on you.’ The threat was always there of pulling the plug. I told them I was willing to take that risk because I believed I was doing the right thing.”
Spadea raised Republican hackles by reprinting columns from Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak critical of GOP officials, and followed up with the Phillips screed portraying the GOP as insufficiently committed to saving “the lives of unborn children” and opposing “the spread of homosexual perversion and disease.” Phillips exhorted readers not to “waste your vote” on the lesser of evils but instead support his U.S. Taxpayers Party. A month later Spadea was out on the street.
“Bill is a courageous young man,” says Phillips, who is letting Spadea as well as the CR executive director and a few interns occupy office space that is rented by his organizations.
“He’s on a total ego trip,” says Fordham University junior Bart Haggerty, one of a half-dozen candidates who plan to oppose Spadea’s probable reelection bid at July’s CR convention.
Then again, Spadea says he might join a presidential campaign instead.
“If the Republican leadership doesn’t watch out, there’s going to be bloodshed in San Diego in 1996,” he says. “The party will destroy itself fighting over ideas. The big tent is not big enough to encompass diametrically opposed philosophies. On the one hand, I’m telling Republicans that, yes, there is a battle. On the other hand, I’m choosing sides.”
BROOKS BLASTS MCHENRY
CONGRESSMEN STEREOTYPED NEW JERSEY
‘Unprofessional, ill-timed, and unfortunate’
New Jersey College Republican Chairman Garrett Brooks has unleashed a blistering attack against Congressman Patrick McHenry, who inferred that the entire state of New Jersey lacked moral acumen in a recent Fox News interview.
Brooks, in a spirited display of state pride, told McHenry to mind his own business (meaning: “Go to hell”). Brooks said the comments should be expected coming from “a man who makes everyone else’s business his own.”
(Expect McHenry to respond with a press release citing unverifiable polling data saying that he should be installed Tsar of the Smokey Mountains.)
Here is the press release:
Press Release from New Jersey College Republican State Committee
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Earlier this week, I was disheartened to hear Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) spew forth foolish and tactless blanket statements concerning my state.
He must have forgotten that there is a gubernatorial candidate named Doug Forrester. Doug is a Republican running for Governor against Jon Corzine. Doug has a lot of integrity. That is one of the reasons I support him.
McHenry’s comments were unprofessional, ill-timed, and unfortunate.
Even so, they should be expected from a man who makes everyone else’s business his own.
McHenry’s comments on Fox News before a nationally televised audience just goes to show that the 20-something year old Congressman doesn’t quite get it.
Nor does it seem that he has voluntary control over his own mouth.
According to a recent expose´ in The New Republic, he verbally bullied college students as well. The article exposed the fact that he threatened College Republicans to vote the way that he wanted in a CR election. If they didn’t, McHenry claimed he would “end” their political career.
This, coming from a Member of Congress.
McHenry didn’t quite “get” sticking to his own business back then, and he hasn’t quite learned his lesson now.
Perhaps “Pillsbury” McHenry should practice a time-honored tradition: sticking to his own business and not meddling in places he doesn’t belong.
Regards,
Garrett Brooks
Chairman
New Jersey College Republican State Committee
NEW JERSEY RACE TIGHTENS
CORZINE LEAD VANISHED
The Jon Corzine campaign, which usually revolves around strategies that involve their candidate being obscenly rich, is wondering why they only have a four point lead.
Here’s an idea:
He gave a $470,000 “loan” to a former girlfriend who runs the state’s largest worker union. (This brings new meaning to the phrase “in bed with big labor.”)
BRINGING RDI TO NEW JERSEY
ORIGINAL SIGNATOR OF RDI CONTACT CONSIDERS SENATE RUN
A special operative reports that New Jersey GOP insiders are quietly worrying about conservative former CRNC National Chairman Bill Spadea running for the 2006 U.S. Senate nomination against Tom Kean, Jr.
“Especially worried are the party-establishment footlickers at Forrester for Governor, who are all in bed with Kean’s people,” the special operative reports. (Does this matter if Forrester loses and the party establishment ends up sitting around watching The West Wing reruns on Bravo?)
Bill Spadea, of course, signed the first CRNC-RDI contract – possibly with his own blood or promise of first born son – back in the mid 1990’s after then RNC Chairman Haley Barbour told him to “get the Hell out of politics” and defunded the CRNC.
Spadea is not saying anything about the Senate rumors, but clues can be found at his “campaign” website: [Bill Spadea]
OPERATION GARDEN STATE
Dan Schuberth, candidate for CRNC National Chairman, unleashes “Operation Garden State” (whatever that means).