My friends, Tech President reminds us that it was two years ago today was Dick Wadhams' then cadidate George Allen uttered his now famous and well distributed message of well, macaca.
Is Wadhams going to have Schaffer run the same, "campaign on positive, constructive ideas"?
Progress Now sent out a hilarious header on one of its mailings proclaiming that Dick Wadhams hasn't lost an election since 2006. I saved it to PeakDems:
It looks like the gilded hand of Mr. Wadhams will keep his record of defeat intact as he runs Bob Schaffer's campaign into the ground - with Schaffer's able assistance.
The Macaca Whisperer certainly knew Schaffer's parasailing history when he personally cleared the Republican field for Bob's Senate run. And Colorado Republicans, living 10 years in the past, forgot that all their big time players who were going to give them a "permanent majority" are now either in jail or under indictment.
It looked like Mike Riley at the Post didn't know that sordid history, but he sure is happy to find out all the gory details of Bob's love affair with the Marianas Islands: their unique immigration status, the Abramoff/DeLay connections Bob has had, and how the amorality of those various felons affected Bob's modern day Republican Party family values:
So there's a blog that's been around for a few months that seems eerily familiar to CO-GOP chair Dick Wadhams' old antics. No blogxygen for them, the site called schaffervudall offers up the following breaking news:
Udall's Campaign Chief Discusses "Nutroots"
Mark Udall's 2008 Senate bid will undoubtedly lead him and his campaign into the cesspool of the left-wing blogosphere, and his campaign manager's recent trip to the YearlyKos convention is a preview of the extremist viewpoints that Udall will take pains to avoid in the general election in his attempt to abandon his "liberal" image, even as he collects their money and pays lip-service to their demands.
BTW, the source for that was none other than ColoradoConfidential. So yes indeed, a few of us "nutroots" met with Udall's campaign manager over a few drinks. Shocking, I know. There's really nothing surprising there. In fact, that was the whole article. They forgot to channel O'Reilly and call us Nazis, KKK members, and muslim terruh-ists. Let me add a little content, "Those DFH, liberal extremist, crazy, wacko, blah, blah, blah." This stuff writes itself. Why, maybe Dick Wadhams should hire me to write for him. You see, the website that Wadhams paid righty bloggers to write in South Dakota was called daschlevthune. Oh look it's still up: http://daschlevthune...
Who is this "Dick Wadhams" you've been hearing of as the probable incoming chair of the Colorado Republican Party? Well, you've probably heard of this video, but now you really should take the time to watch it:
That's former Virginia Senator George Allen using an obscure racial slur against S.R. Sidarth, an Indian-American campaign staffer for James Webb who was operating the camera. The (native Californian) Allen also suggested that the (native Virginian) staffer was a newcomer to Virginia and America. I think that after you watch that clip, you will agree that this was no slip of the tongue, it was a calculated campaign move. And who was George Allen's campaign manager? None other than Dick Wadhams, whom the Washington Post described as "an itinerant political hit man known for his nasty attacks on opponents." There are probably a lot of political consultants who would put a description like that on their resume, but in this case, the "macaca moment" helped end Wadhams' client's career and make James Webb the new Democratic senator from Virginia.
Now if you think "macaca" was an isolated incident, you should know that under Wadhams' tutelage, former Montana Senator Conrad Burns called Arabs "ragheads" during his 2000 Senate campaign. You just have to wonder which Colorado Republican will slur which minority ethnic group with Wadhams in charge.
Anyway, with George Allen safely planted in the dustbin of history, Wadhams is back in Colorado, where he got his start. But if you ask me, he is arriving an election cycle too late. In 2006, he probably could have cowed the state Democrats and rolled the local media with an explicitly racial attack, but I am cautiously optimistic that in the 2008 cycle the state Dems will have internalized the strong criticism they have been getting for folding on racial attacks in 2006, and push back hard just like Webb's team did last year. And the media will follow, just as they did when the "macaca" gambit blew up in Wadhams' candidate's face. Because in America and the real world of Colorado, that stuff just doesn't fly any more.
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