I had written this earlier and decided to sleep on it before publishing. But Gary from Let Freedom Ring seems to have egged me on like a kid on the edge of a freshly frozen pond, I blame him for the following

The DFL reelected Chairman Brian Melendez as State Party Chair this weekend. The Strib has a very short piece on State Party Chairman following elections.

DFL Party chair Brian Melendez, coming off one of the biggest DFL sweeps in many election years, was expected to win a shoo-in election to a second two-year term at the party’s central committee Saturday at North Branch High School. Usually, when one party wins big, the chairman of the triumphant side is reelected, if he or she seeks it, and the losing chairman bows out or gets the boot.

Interestingly, Republican Party chairman Ron Carey said he knows of no opponent “on the horizon” and says he likely also will seek a second term at that party’s June convention. “There’s no groundswell of anger or assigning of culpability” to party officials and there’s an acceptance that anti-war sentiment and Washington scandals drove the election verdicts in all states, Carey said. Many state GOP activists are happy that the party was able to reelect Gov. Tim Pawlenty and hold on to the open Sixth Congressional District seat with Rep. Michele Bachmann, Carey said. “We were one of the very few purple [competitive] states to hold onto key Republican seats.”

Carey fails to even acknowledge that those ‘DFL sweeps’ are us Republicans being swept out of office. 19 seats in the MN House. A Congressional seat. 6 seats in the MN Senate. Plus 2 Constitutional offices. All in all, as happy as I am that Bachmann won, its not exactly something that warms my heart given every thing else.

But then again, I am being told that my opinion doesn’t or shouldn’t count in GOP politics anymore by Carey’s defenders, as I did question his leadership ability following the complete and total collapse under his reign. I don’t buy the line that nothing could have changed the results, although I do understand it was a bad year for GOPers. But I don’t believe every one who lost had to, or that things had to be as bad as they were.

I also can’t over look that the man who apparently was so brilliant to get Pawlenty and Bachmann to win in 06, is running around the state pretending to listen to activists. Oh yeah, for those of you who think this is a man listening to the activists, think again. Carey is going to have to face these very activists this summer when he will need to be reelected as Chair by them. He’s gathering information for his reelection campaign as much as he is trying to pretend he’s listening to the base. Which he says is not upset. WTF

Here’s the really depressing part, word is that Sen. Coleman and the RNC national leadership have decided to back Carey no matter what for MNGOP Chair. That pretty much scared every one off who was considering it on the premise of ‘we can do better’. So in other words. Ron Carey will be leading the Republican party of Minnesota through the 2008 election.

In other words, advantage DFL. gOD help us.

I’d love to be wrong folks, and maybe I am, but I just don’t see how things are going to be different next time with the same people making the same decisions for both parties. Ron Carey has been a member of our state party executive committee for 10 years, and he seems to have no clue what went wrong in 2004 or 2006. In case you forgot, in 2004 we ran the Chair (Eibensteiner) who presided over that election, out of town because of it how certain elected officials embraced state run gambling and abandoned the platform, not to mention losing our large majority in the state house.

But nope, people are content with a guy with 10 years of Republican party leadership experience failing his big test, and then spending months trying to figure out what went wrong. Don’t you think the Republican party of Minnesota has given Ron Carey about as much time as we can to get the hang of this whole ‘leadership thing’?

I always fell through those ponds and swamps as a kid, as the ice wasn’t thick enough. Maybe I should have slept on it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under 2008, MNGOP Reform, Minnesota, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.