Some Ohio Republicans worry that [Brett] Buerck’s and [Kyle] Sisk’s [two consultants to Republican state House Speaker Larry Householder] influence on the 2004 election may be more consequential. Ordinarily, this state’s GOP, which has held a virtual lock on power since 1990, would be a clear asset for the president. He could take advantage of the party’s grass-roots organization, official surrogates and goodwill with the electorate. But a host of local controversies have scuffed the Republican brand name in Ohio. The most malodorous of these involves allegations of improper fundraising and self-dealing by the two consultants to Republican state House Speaker Larry Householder.<\/p>\n
The accusations erupted onto Ohio front pages in the spring, and federal and state criminal investigations are underway. Ohioans have been treated to regular servings of leaked strategy memos and e-mails written by Buerck, Sisk and others in Householder’s camp. With a swaggering tone, the documents suggest an approach to politics that borrows equally from H.R. Haldeman and Barney Fife.<\/p>\n
They also have turned Buerck and Sisk into symbols for a season of furrowed brows and angry words within the Ohio GOP, which is in turmoil on numerous other fronts. All this is a burden that Bush, running slightly behind in polls in this critical swing state, surely would prefer not to carry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Granted, this doesn’t have anything to do with Bush directly, but as J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, acknowledged, “When people don’t feel passionate that Republicans can and will make a difference, that makes the president’s job that much more difficult.”<\/p>\n
And that’s good news for Kerry in a key — if not the<\/i> key — battleground state of 2004. In most competitive states, both sides will be looking to important statewide figures like governors to give their campaigns a boost. In Ohio, Bush is clearly not relying on Taft — the “idiot, stupid, corrupt, dumb, and rotten” one — to generate support.<\/p>\n
In a close state with 20 electoral votes, every little bit helps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I knew Ohio’s Republicans were having some internal troubles, but I don’t think I appreciated the depths of their discontent. Kos discovered yesterday that Grover Norquist, an informal Bush advisor and \u00fcber-activist among DC’s right-wing elite, had some outrageously negative things to say about Ohio’s inept governor, Republican Bob Taft. (Kos even has an audio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}