How more appropriate for an Easter Sunday than it was for ace RTD columnist Jeff Schapiro to sharpen his quill (and his spring spheres) and poke a few holes in the backside of one of his most potent, and persistent, bugbears, George Allen.
Eerily, some of Jeff’s themes follow a Washington Examiner piece I had published on the same day. The downside is that I can’t cry foul. The other downside is that I appear to be weaving dangerously close to the conventional wisdom. The upside? I’m working on it.
But back to the scene of Jeff’s latest foray…
He opens his tale with an altercation between Allenites and tea party types. While I’m still not convinced the tea party in Virginia has the political juice it had even a few months ago, it’s still a potent force for now. How else to explain the comic turn by former AFP head Ben Marchi as he lectured the tea party leaders on IRS rules and open access. It wasn’t that long ago that, when he was running AFP, Marchi had turned it into a full-time arm of the Allen campaign, taking the then-undeclared candidate on statewide tours, campaign stops, and more. If anyone was treading close to the IRS line on what nonprofits can and cannot do, it was AFP.
But that was then and now, we have real candidates. And so, Jeff wonders, what price will George Allen have to pay to win the backing of tea party types who seem to have their own champion in Jamie Radtke? A full-on abasement like Robert Hurt? Or, in one of his more lurid passages, perhaps Virginia will replay the script acted in Nevada and Delaware last year, where fringe candidates seized the GOP electorate by the tingles and swept the establishment candidates aside (only to lose later in the general election).
Doubtful. Virginia went that route once, with Oliver North. It’s unlikely to do so again…or at least won’t as long as John Warner is still with us. And Allen has done all the right things to make sure the current party establishment is behind him (pay no attention to that story about Ken Cuccinelli looking for and quietly encouraging other candidates. And really, really pay no attention to the ties between Cuccinelli’s own communications staff and that of another declared Senate candidate).
Still there are other narratives: Virginia could follow the example of Kentucky with Rand Paul, or Florida with Marco Rubio. Rubio, though, was an experienced pol. Paul, while a political novice, had a national following owing to his father, Ron. No one in the current Virginia GOP field can claim Paul-like advantages. The only two kind-of outsiders who might be able to follow the Rubio model are Bob Marshall and Corey Stewart, and neither of them have entered the race. Yet.
So the great theme in what will be an uncommonly long campaign remains a mystery. So into that void comes an old one:
Former Del. Jack Reid of Henrico cruised the Shad Planking wearing a Radtke-for-Senate sticker. He is troubled by Allen’s record and rhetoric: “I can’t think of any reason to send Allen back. … The macaca thing is not going to go away – it’s just not.”
And so long as Mr. Reid continues to flog it to eager-eared scribblers like Jeff, it will never go away.
But it is interesting to consider Reid for a moment…I was told some time ago that he counseled Ms. Radtke not to challenge state Sen. John Watkins in a primary, saying that she would never earn the support of the business community. Does he think that by having her campaign statewide the business community that would have shunned her in a local race will gravitate toward her in a statewide contest? We have a long time to find out.
(Cross-posted at the Score Radio Network)
