Virginia National Republican Committeeman Morton Blackwell is still intent on fighting a rules change instituted at the Republican convention in Tampa last summer. In the view of some Republicans (including Virginia’s delegation), the rules changes — pushed through at the urging of a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Romney campaign, Ben Ginsberg — would have centralized control of the Republican party and effectively barred any future uprising from the grassroots.
In his most recent statement, in which he promises a “showdown” at the RNC meeting next week in Los Angeles, Blackwell says:
…the Republican National Committee will consider the repudiation of highly controversial changes to The Rules of the Republican Party made at the National Convention Rules Committee in Tampa last summer. These changes, led by Romney campaign spokesman Ben Ginsberg, were a systematic power grab which caused an unprecedented uproar at the convention.
Our Party must recruit many new grassroots conservatives in order to win future elections. Those potential recruits can be attracted only to a party where they are welcome, where power can flow from the bottom up, and where newcomers are treated fairly, politely, and even cordially.
We’ll see how that goes.
But of even greater interest is the new letter Mr. Blackwell has written to RNC chairman Reince Priebus (a copy of which you can read here). It covers not only the rules issue, but also Blackwell’s critique of the RNC’s “autopsy” on the 2012 campaign. Blackwell has praise for some parts of the report. But his criticisms are pointed — especially at the report’s unwillingness to put names and faces to those consultants who got rich even as they botched the 2012 effort:
Somehow, the left has overcome the greed and power of their consultants sufficiently to invest more of their resources than we do on ground-game activities, which include data acquisition, social media which directly interacts with voters, and a permanent campaign.
Well more than a billion dollars was spent on paid advertising on behalf of Republican candidates in 2012. Hundreds of millions of dollars of commissions on that advertising certainly went into the pockets of consultants who had sufficient control of the budgets to make that happen. Those consultants, who had to have known about the ground-game activities on the left, pocketed those hundreds of millions of dollars and thereby knowingly starved our Republican ground game.
Not all political consultants loot the political budgets over which they have power. Many consultants run campaigns well-balanced between “air war” and “ground war.” A thorough political autopsy of the 2012 elections would have followed the money (the advertising commissions) and identified those consultants responsible for spending overwhelmingly on commissionable advertising and comparative peanuts on the non-commissionable aspects of politics in which Obama and his allies whipped us badly.
Such research wouldn’t be easy, but there’s enough information on required reports to the Federal Election Commission to provide a pretty good idea of who are the worst offending Republican consultants. Perhaps that research can come from some other source.
Meanwhile, I’m sure the major players in the Republican consultariat are looking over the Growth and Opportunity Project report. They’ll do all they can to keep those paid advertising commissions flowing into their pockets, but, unidentified, they’re looking for new profit centers for themselves among the report’s many proposals for new spending.
Indeed they are.
