At Politico, Alexander Burns has a good basic rundown of the contest for Republican National Committee chairmanship, which will culminate next month.
Current RNC Chairman Mike Duncan is considered the front-runner, partly because of his fundraising ability, and partly because none of the other five candidates has a whole lot of momentum. Burns rates Michigan GOP chief Saul Anuzis, who’s sort of the symbol of blue-state Republicans, and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, as running neck-and-neck in second place. But he agrees with Ed Kilgore’s recent assessment that the entry into the campaign of former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has destabilized the contest–particularly now that Blackwell has formed a “ticket” with another hero of the Cultural Right, national co-chairwoman aspirant Tina Benkiser of Texas.
Ideology isn’t much of a factor in this competition, beyond the suggestions of Steele’s rivals that his (largely repudiated) relationship with the puny but totemic Republican Leadership Council makes him suspect. All the candidates are running as hard-core pro-life conservatives.
As Burns’ account suggests, inside-baseball factors like the relationship of candidates to actual RNC members will likely determine the outcome. Democrats should probably welcome a win by Duncan, which would nicely symbolize the conservative conviction that nothing’s really wrong with the GOP, or by Blackwell, who was famously described by George W. Bush as “a nut.”
One comment on “The RNC Chair Race”
ducdebrabant on
Blackwell belongs behind bars, and may get there yet. If that happens while he’s RNC chairman, I’ll be pleased as punch. I hope they take him away in handcuffs and alert the media first.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
Blackwell belongs behind bars, and may get there yet. If that happens while he’s RNC chairman, I’ll be pleased as punch. I hope they take him away in handcuffs and alert the media first.