October 20, 2010 07:27 PM UTC

Dick's Disaster, Anyone?

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

There are two major narratives taking shape in Colorado, one of which will emerge as the definitive story of the 2010 elections here. The first is the one you know, because you can’t visit a media outlet without hearing it over and over: 2010 is a Republican “wave year,” Democrats are desperately fighting against an inevitable tide of voter discontent and will pay with their majorities at all levels of national, state and local government.

The other narrative, however, has only haltingly broken through the saturation of bad stories for Democrats–many of which rest all of their assumptions on polling models that may or may not be an accurate reflection of what constitutes a “likely voter.” There is a growing concern among pollsters, and political strategists in general, that “likely voter” models are skewed against Democrats based on little more than empirical speculation, and may not reflect who will actually show up to vote.

Lurking just beneath the surface of those assumptions here in Colorado are a series of candidate recruitment disasters and bad primary election choices. We’ve covered these events in detail as they’ve occurred: the punking of gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry by GOP kingpins in favor of Scott McInnis, McInnis’ spectacular collapse under allegations of plagiarism, Ken Buck’s “Tea Party”-fueled primary win over the more electable Jane Norton–and the latest damaging exposure of multiple Republican legislative candidates with violent and other criminal records.

And as the Colorado Independent’s John Tomasic reports today, the one person all of these breakdowns have in common, GOP chairman Dick Wadhams, is taking fire once again.

The Colorado Republican Party’s effort to win back top seats has been characterized nationally as a “gaffapalooza” and a “farce,” with many analysts pointing fingers at state GOP Chairman Dick Wadhams. Observers on the ground in Colorado, including GOP staffers and candidates, say that in the year of the Tea Party, Wadhams simply failed to properly vet candidates. The top-of-the-ticket false starts and shuffling have drawn plenty of attention and spawned mockery but the farce grows dark at the bottom of the ticket, where GOP candidates with criminal histories of violence and abuse dot the ballot…

The problems for the GOP this year don’t stop at the top of the ticket, and they don’t stop with the chairman. Wadhams’ point-man in the state House campaigns, Rep. Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, played down the criminal histories of many of this year’s GOP candidates. He told the Denver Post he was unaware any of the candidates even had police records.

“This is the challenge of having ordinary people running for office,” he said.

A review of records that have drawn the attention of reporters and bloggers this fall…suggests that “ordinary” is a word only someone who processes rap sheets for a living might use to describe these men…

Republican party 2010 staffers and operatives who spoke to the Colorado Independent on condition they would remain anonymous agreed that Wadhams has failed to vet candidates and hobbled the party.

“I think Wadhams has been astonishingly ineffective,” said one. “More than that, he has been an impediment to success. Chest-thumping obnoxious radio interviews do not make for great leadership…He trashed McInnis. He trashed Buck. … Find me someone who Wadhams hasn’t trashed and I’ll show you someone new to town. Why didn’t he put people through the [vetting] paces instead? You’ve got to put candidates through the paces today. The online world is murder. If the party doesn’t find it, someone else will, and then it will be all over the media.”

Our view: as we’ve watched this election season unfold, we’ve been struck by the dissonance in the media between an airtight insistence that Republican triumph is inevitable, and the steady drip of revelations about the actual Republican candidates running for office that would seem to, by any objective measure, say the exact opposite. It seems clear to us that most major media outlets decided very early on that the narrative of a massive Republican wave was correct, and have proven reluctant to accept the changing nature of the situation here in Colorado.

Dick Wadhams is renowned for his ability to tirelessly browbeat the media with his version of every story. It’s his job to flack the party line, of course, and at least until McInnis’ implosion threw the governor’s race into chaos, Wadhams has generally done it well. But a combination of presuppositions in the press about this election, and Wadhams’ efforts to shape news coverage may have left the media in Colorado inattentive when things started to unravel in broadly discernable ways–even as they faithfully reported the individual pieces of the puzzle.

Because we submit to you: from the revelations about legislative candidates with criminal backgrounds–the lede in this story, the fact that the records uncovered were almost 2-1 GOP and only GOP candidates had violent crimes in their past, the media has largely buried–to the much-too-slow realization that Ken Buck has critically wounded himself since the primary, the trainwreck(s) in the gubernatorial race, the laughable candidacies of Scott Gessler and Walker “Bush” Stapleton…is the GOP ticket not in danger of unraveling, folks? Would it not be unraveling, at the very least, in any other election year?

In two weeks, that question will be answered. If the conventional wisdom was correct all along, and the GOP “wave year” is enough to overcome these failures of candidate recruitment and self-inflicted wounds–or, if the story just isn’t disseminated widely enough to be heard over the assumptions–perhaps this criticism of Wadhams will subside. But if not…