September 25, 2011 06:59 PM UTC

Dick Wadhams Gets a Job!

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• by: Colorado Pols

From our friends at National Journal’s Hotline, H/T to Lynn Bartels of the Denver paper:

Michigan Republicans are getting a harder sell from candidates who want the opportunity to take on Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra may be the front-runner at the moment; the Holland Republican lost his bid for the gubernatorial nomination in 2010, but his time in office has given him a solid fundraising and political base.

Before he gets a clean shot at Stabenow, Hoekstra must get through a host of other Republicans. The one who will give Hoekstra the most trouble: Former state Board of Education president Clark Durant…

In the Michigan U.S. Senate primary, Clark Durant is the hard-charging conservative versus the “establishment” Pete Hoekstra–though Hotline notes that Durant has plenty of establishment support of his own, such as friend of Wadhams Saul Anuzis.

Still, it’s a bit of a role-reversal (publicly, anyway) for former Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams to run Durant’s campaign, after declining to seek re-election for Colorado GOP chair under a cloud of accusations of meddling in primaries spanning two election cycles–muscling primary candidates around on the way to losing general elections to Democrats. Between Bob Schaffer and Jane Norton, Wadhams has overseen both sides of the primary coin recently, that is the winning and the losing. And while once he got to the general election it’s been more about losing in recent years, statistically that means he’s up for a win. Right?

All told, we do think a sharp-elbowed GOP Senate primary is exactly what Wadhams is best at, so it’s a good hire–he just wasn’t very good at admitting this while he was GOP chairman.