Deval Patrick’s dismal poll showings a boon to challengers

I agree with all your points but in organizing the libs have an inherent advantage. I am a typical conservative and my #1 goal in life is to orient my life to minimize govt interaction. I want to be left alone, pursue my happiness and be self reliant for most things. The typical liberal views govt as their god and want to interact and be part of the govt at all levels. The best and brightest of the conservatives never enter politics whereas in the case of liberals ( although if they were bright they would not be liberal !) do. They actually have a goal of ending up as a school teacher or academia or media. Most conservatives want nothing to do do with these professions as a profession and this is a huge philosophical gap which creates a huge advantage for the libs.

Your point about using lib tactics without their ideology is spot-on.

The MA GOP's largest impediment to winning is the mindset itself. They've become so elitist, so out-of-touch, that to even actively go out and TRY to win is considered beneath the dignity of its calcified members. They don't want to win, they don't want activists, they don't want new blood, and they don't want anyone to the right of Ted Kennedy. They're not even a party anymore, but yet they hold the deed to a house that has collapsed in on itself and shoot at anyone trying to get near it to rebuild it. We've got to get control of THAT before we can begin to take on the Democrats.

>We did have 16 years of Republican governors before Patrick

Weld, Celucci, Swift and Romney.

And none of them could even get rid of Dukakis’s income tax surcharge (retroactively appllied, I DO remember).

So with wussies for Repubs, who cares.

". It doesn't serve any state having 90%+ of its elected officials in one party (that wouldn't be good even in a GOP state, because statism, arrogance of power and corruption inevitably seeps in)."

You'd have all the states liberals be and vote RINO.

You might be right. I don’t know anything about the Republicans running for Governor in MA.

Rhode Island is different from Massachusetts in a few ways. It has a significantly lower percentage of the university and government crowd, not to mention professional political activists (including reporters)l and a larger portion of its populace is blue-collar.

{larger portion of its populace is blue-collar.}

Which means Rhode Island is Labor Union heavy. For a New England state, RI does have some pro-life sentiment. It has the most restrictive abortion laws in New England, where the rest of the region is an abortion doctor’s paradise.

The problem is the RI GOP is made up of secular minded WASPs. Think the Chafee family. They’re a dying breed. Pro-life sentiment is in the church going Catholics. The problem is they vote for the Labor Unions. As a result, a pro-life Republican is unacceptable to RI, while a pro-life Dem is.

While states like Ca, Ct, Ri, and MA are strong Marxist Red states during Presidential years, these states have not had much luck in electing Rodent Governors in the past 20 years. The question is why haven’t the GOP Governors of these states had much success in builiding the state parties to at least be competitive?

The short answer ? Because virtually all those Governors were RINOs (and in some cases, deliberately sabotaged Conservative activists, candidates and the like).

In CA, you had a successful Conservative GOPer Governor (George Deukmejian, 1983-91), who kept the party in decent shape, but when Pete Wilson exited the Senate to succeed him in ‘91, he inherited a lot of positives to grow on, but Wilson was a Country-Clubber elitist and he openly declared war on Tom McClintock and went out of his way to ensure he’d lose statewide office in the GOP year of ‘94. By ‘96, all of the positives Wilson inherited evaporated on his watch, we lost the Assembly and started our decline in the number of Congressional seats. Dan Lungren lost in a landslide to Gray Davis in ‘98 (repudiation of Wilson). Ah-nold has been an extension of Wilson’s elitist arrogance, with a massive dosage of gov’t expansion, spending and taxation (to the point that Davis, the Democrat, looked like Calvin Coolidge by comparison), and he also did the same thing to McClintock that Wilson did in ‘94, going out of his way not only to keep him from winning the Lt Governorship in ‘06, he so crippled him for his Congressional race last year that McC only barely won in a solid GOP seat (he ran a rich RINO, ex-Rep. Doug Ose, against him in the primary). When Ah-nold exits next year, it’s almost a given the Dems will seize the Governorship and inflict a massive anti-GOP gerrymander to make us completely irrelevent there by 2012.

In CT, there hasn’t been a Dem Governor elected since Bill O’Neill in 1986 (indeed, there is no former Dem Governor from CT still living), but from 1990 onward, you’ve had a leftist ex-RINO independent (Lowell Weicker), John Rowland (who was forced from office on corruption), and the amiable dunce RINO Jodi Rell, who gleefully gives away her own power to making the office powerless (the GOP legislators held like a block to preserve her power to appoint a Senator in case of vacancy, and she stabbed them in the back by signing off on the Dem bill to take it away !). It’s no surprise the GOP has collapsed there. As recently as 1997, the GOP had control of the State Senate. Today, they have only 1/3rd of the Senate and less than 1/4th of the House. She wins in a landslide and doesn’t have even an inch of coattails (and she could probably care less).

In MA, for which I’ve written about endlessly, had 16 years of GOP Governors, but all ended up being RINOs. When Dukakis retired in 1990, the Dems were rather unpopular in the state and the GOP was in a very prime position to take advantage. Unfortunately, who got nominated by the parties was a jaw-dropper. The GOP should’ve put up House Minority Leader Steve Pierce, a center-right candidate, but instead, it went to the liberal William Weld (who last ran for office on the 1978 ticket (for Attorney General) that was full of leftist RINOs that lost to Ed King’s ticket, King being a Conservative Dem who took out Dukakis after a single disastrous term). The Dems, conversely, put up the colorful John Silber, a populist-Conservative (to the horror of the liberal base). Weld ran to Silber’s LEFT in the general and won, and the GOP swept in several statewide officials and came within 4 seats of tying the State Senate. I have said to this day that I believe wholeheartedly that Weld WAS a Democrat agent, and his actions in office proved it. He systematically and deliberately sabotaged the Conservative activists in the party on the right and even gave the finger to even earnest liberal Republicans that wanted to have a GOP opposition to the Dems (in other words, he screwed everyone and anyone who had an “R” label). He tried to wage war nationally on Conservative Republicans (openly aiding Jesse Helms’s opponent in NC, the Black liberal Dem Harvey Gantt) and after he inflicted maximum damage on the state party, he quit, arrogantly believing he’d get an Ambassadorship to Mexico (for which Helms in one of his finest moments, shot down, and sent that rat bastard running for Kentucky - where he promptly mismanaged a college right into the ground).

After Weld was his protege, Paul Cellucci, who couldn’t do anything (except he did manage to get reelected, after beating another Republican, Joe Malone, the State Treasurer, in the primary). Unlike Cellucci, who didn’t even want to be Governor, Malone did (and, in hindsight, should’ve gotten the nomination). Cellucci had to wait until Dubya became President so he could secure an Ambassadorship to Canada, and he cleared out. That left the infamous, and unprepared, Jane Swift, who was so clueless, she wanted to outflank the Democrats on the far-left and ended up pissing everybody off. She was prepared to carry on her dog and pony show to the 2002 election, naming radical gay activist and leftist RINO Patrick Guerrero as her running mate (so audacious that most Democrats wouldn’t have had the balls to go whole-hog in putting someone like that on their ticket), but she withdrew when she saw that good ole Slick Willard, riding in on his white horse, fresh off of saving the Salt Lake City Olympics from Godzilla, Mothra, Kahless and Ming the Merciless, made it plain he’d spend the gross domestic product of France to buy the nomination. Well, we all know what happened with him, another Weldite who was really just using the office as a stepping-stone to the Presidency, and had no real intention of doing the job. With Slick’s departure in 2007, the MA GOP ceased to exist beyond an on-paper party. 16 short years earlier, we were competitive for half the Congressional seats in the state, even the Senate seats, 4 seats away from taking a legislative body, winning statewide offices, and today we couldn’t win ANY of that (and even if we could win the Governorship next year, there’s no party presence in the legislature, now just 10% Republican (and liberal RINO at that), a GOP Governor would be a figurehead).

In RI, there has actually only been one Democrat Governor since after 1985 (Bruce Sundlun, 1991-95). We might’ve had a continuous line had the R Governor in office in 1990, Ed DiPrete, not gotten into ethical trouble. The Dems were having problems in the ‘80s and the GOP made gains against them (so much so that by 1988, we had both House seats, John Chafee in the Senate seat, the Governorship, and had won off-and-on some of the other statewide offices). The GOP also tried a novel, outside-the-box approach of running large slates of women for office, both in the legislature and statewide, meeting with a decent amount of success. The downside, however, was that they played down social issues (so, of course, you’d have Dems that were often to the right of the Republican women on pro-life issues). That sputtered out by the ‘90s (especially when Congresswoman Claudine Schneider was demolished by Sen. “Stillborn” Pell). When Bruce Sundlun, who defeated DiPrete, started having problems of his own and was obliterated by the nutty Myrth York in the ‘94 Dem primary, the GOP had a serious upset when Lincoln Almond (who had run for office back in the ‘60s) defeated the last (to date) GOP Congressman, Ron Machtley. What many folks thought would be a marquee race between Sundlun and Machtley turned into a “Who ?” race between York and Almond. Almond prevailed, but his was, unfortunately, a narrow win with no real GOP gains (and Machtley’s seat, instead of going to notable inner-city doctor Kevin Vigilante, went to the drunken progeny of Ted the Swimmer, Paddy, who ran one of the nastiest campaigns of the past 20 years).

Almond was another “amiable” R, but didn’t leave much of a mark (his key moment was replacing Chafee with his boy when Pops bought the farm, a BIG mistake). A problem the party had in ‘02 was that there was no clear successor to Almond. There were no Congressmembers, no one of note in the legislature, and no Mayors (Lincoln Chafee was the lone prominent GOP Mayor, and he was Senator). Don Carcieri, a businessman, who never ran for office before, stepped up, and the GOP lucked out when Myrth York (on her 3rd attempt) took the nomination, and the people of RI would’ve voted for Jesse Helms for Governor in ‘02 over York they were so sick of her. I will cite Carcieri as one who genuinely was interested in growing the party (so much so that I cite him as perhaps the only pol from New England I could support for President), and tried gamely to do so. In off-year legislative elections, he scored some gains, but ‘08 wiped out everything (we lost more seats in the RI House in those elections than we now currently hold). Straight-party-line ticket voting is what caused the big problem for us. The anti-Carcieri media lampooned him after the election with all the GOP losses saying all he got elected was the new Mayor of Cranston, Allan Fung (a Chinese-American). He’s tried to govern legitimately as a Conservative, but with a now-irrelevent GOP membership, it’s been difficult.

Now that “Missing Linc” Chafee exited the GOP, he is now seriously running for Governor as a leftist Independent next year (Carcieri has not been able to recruit a substantial first-tier candidate for the GOP as of this writing). It is conceivable the Democrat opponents of the former RINO Chafee will be far more Conservative than he, though he’ll probably get along swimmingly with the far-left elements of the Democrat party if he gets elected. Too bad we can’t get Carcieri to run against Paddy for RI-1.