Posted on 04/29/2010 10:27:49 AM PDT by Maelstorm
NRSC Chairman John Cornyn said today that Florida’s GOP Senate primary has been “a learning experience” for him. If we’ll remember back to last year, Cornyn’s NRSC recruited (then Republican) Governor Charlie Crist to challenge the already announced conservative darling Marco Rubio for the open Senate seat left by the departure of Mel Martinez. Of course Rubio didn’t need a challenger, and should have been allowed to run uninterrupted from Washington.
Cornyn sees that wisdom now. “In this political environment it’s not necessarily helpful for candidates running in the states to have the national party chairman” endorse them. No joke. Washington couldn’t be more unpopular, and it’s meddling like this that helps turn off the very GOP voters that candidates seek on election day. “Cornyn said that voters don’t want to ‘have their choices made’ for them by the political elite. They want those in Washington to hear their voices.”
Cornyn wants the money back that his PAC gave to Crist, but as our friend at Red State, Erick Erickson noted yesterday, Crist won’t do that, can’t do that, because he’s already spent all that money by pre-purchasing his TV ad buys for the fall – an expensive, slimy, and reprehensible move on his part.
As Erick also pointed out, the blame shouldn’t just rest with the Senator, it should also rest with the man he putting charge of running the NRSC, Rob Jesmer. After all, it was Jesmer’s idea to recruit Crist, and other moderates to fight conservative, grassroots supported candidates in races around the country.
In Indiana, Jesmer recruited a “lobbyist who lived in North Carolina who had once been an Indiana Senator,” Dan Coats. At one time Cornyn said the NRSC was going to stay out of contested primaries, but time and again, that has proven not to be true. Here, Jesmer has put Coats in this race, instead of letting conservative Marlin Stutzman get a fair shake.
Rubio, Stutzman, DeVore, and the other shunned Republican candidates will soon get their chance to show who their state’s voters support and perhaps prove to Washington that they shouldn’t be meddling in their party primaries.
exactly.
We could see dozens of Constitution Party and other parties having seats too. The power of the two parties would be strongly curtailed.
I would go so far as to say that the two party system would cease to exist! Had the arbitrary 435 number not been set way back when, we would have a very different political landscape in this country even without article the first.
“Doesn’t matter! Even Madison commented on this in the Federalist Papers saying that, at a maximum, each Representative should report to 50,000 citizens. Think about how much leverage we would have with our elected officials if they only had to be accountable to a small number of people.”
That’s the reason why the founders gave the federal govt limited authority and left almost all matters to the states.
They understood that the smaller the body of representation, the easier it was to have impact upon it. Like making the local school board the entity you go to rather than some nameless bureaucrat in DC to make policy.
If we had this the way the founders intended, it would work out fine. The bad thing now is the feds keep usurping what is the states’ prerogative.
The states individually have little power to change this but collectively, as per Art V of the Constitution, they hold the ultimate trump card to get the federal govt under control. The key is they have to act together.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=36763
Note Cornyn’s statement: “You know, recruiting candidates is a dynamic process. I tried to recruit [former Florida Gov.] Jeb Bush to run for the Senate and after he told me he wouldn’t run. I looked around for the most popular candidate I could find.” That was Crist, he recalled, and when the governor became a candidate last year, “he had a huge lead in the polls.”
Gee, John, shouldn’t you be looking for someone principled rather than popularity? If not, why don’t you select Obama? He was popular too, wasn’t he?
What an idiot we have for a Texas Senator. I am ashamed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.