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OPINIONS
John Patrick Grace: Republican Party must get its act together
Up in Chicago for a wedding last weekend, I spent time foraging in the Windy City media as the Republicans got into their nominating convention in St. Paul, Minn. One headline that caught my attention, in the suburban Daily Herald, said, "State GOP needs to be fixed by 2010."
Despite the shenanigans of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, accused of one screwup after another, Illinois Republicans, out of power in national and in state legislative bodies, have plenty to mend in their own house. The Daily Herald said the paper believed in a strong two-party system and urged the state's Republicans to "get their act together."
It reminded me of West Virginia, where Gov. Joe Manchin's troubles over the illegitimately awarded MBA by West Virginia University to his daughter, Heather Bresch, are dwarfed by the woes of his Republican opponents, including the financial challenges of the Mountain State GOP and its anemic fundraising for the 2008 elections.
The GOP at the national level has troubles of its own. With a reputation to uphold as a maverick, and also a believer in the GOP as "a big tent" party, John McCain apparently wanted to tap Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate. This, according to syndicated columnist Mark Shields, who is a regular on the PBS' "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer."
McCain had already laid the groundwork for this by issuing a public defense of the tactic of naming a pro-abortion rights figure such as Lieberman or former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge as his No. 2., referring to the "big tent" idea.
Social conservatives in the party clearly would have none of it and told McCain in no uncertain terms that such a selection "would provoke an uprising" at the convention.
So then McCain played a true maverick card by naming Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, mother of five and strong pro-life figure but who'd barely stepped out of her native state her entire life and had logged just two years as governor after being mayor of a town with fewer than 10,000 citizens.
Things went swimmingly for about three days until the rumor mill on the blogosphere unearthed the news that Palins' 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant out of wedlock, though planning to marry the father.
The strongest admonition to everybody to lay off the Palins came from the opposing presidential candidate, Barack Obama, who said that the Palin children ought to be "off limits" for political sniping.
The most disturbing thing, however, was the way the news was broken to the GOP delegates on the floor of the convention on its opening day, already truncated because of attention to Hurricane Gustav bearing down on the Gulf Coast. If McCain knew about the pregnancy when he invited Palin onto the ticket, as he said, why the awkward delay in informing his supporters and the country?
Subsequently, we learned that Sarah Palin has engaged an attorney to defend her against charges that she pressured the state of Alaska to fire her former brother-in-law, a state trooper. So now, presumably, this unfortunate litigation will be running parallel to the leadup to the election on Nov. 4.
The first thing to be done to "fix" the national GOP should be a focus on the party's own internal communications. If they can all get on the same page, perhaps other needed reforms will follow.
John Patrick Grace is a book editor and publisher. He lives in Huntington.
