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June 12, 2008 04:15 PM UTC

Wadhams: Dobson Is So Yesterday

  • 29 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports:

Colorado Republicans need to focus on fiscal restraint and small government – and avoid social issues – if they want to reassert themselves against the well-funded and well-organized Democratic Party that has emerged in the Centennial State over the last four years, a panel of experts told The Denver Post on a PoliticsWest webcast.

Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams also said that Focus on the Family founder James Dobson’s comments that he would not vote for the party’s presumptive nominee, John McCain, won’t hurt the Arizona senator.

“I got to tell you, I constantly go to Republican events and speak to them and participate in them and I don’t perceive that attitude among social conservatives in Colorado,” Wadhams said. “In fact, our delegation to the national convention, I haven’t done an actual count, but we have a significant number of social conservatives and they are solidly behind Sen. McCain. And so I just don’t perceive any problem on that front.”

Dobson, the evangelical Christian leader who endorsed President Bush in 2004, opposes McCain. He said in February, “I am convinced Sen. McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are.”

Wadhams predicted that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would be John McCain’s pick for vice president. Panelist Eric Sondermann, an independent political analyst and founder of Denver’s SE2 consulting firm, said that would be a bad choice because Romney doesn’t “break the mold, he is the mold.”

This social wedge-issue stuff just doesn’t play with voters like it used to, says Independence Institute policy maven Jessica Peck Corry:

“I’m concerned about the social issues,” Corry said. “Republicans – we were coming off the booming ’90s and we had the luxury in the state legislature of debating whether or not the Pledge of Allegiance should be mandatory everyday.”

“We don’t have the luxury to have those types of debates now when people are hurting,” Corry said. “We need to get government out of people’s lives, and if I could preach anything or suggest anything to candidates today it’s: ‘Don’t take the bait and start defining what people should do in their own lives.’ Because that’s why, I think, in large part, Republicans did so poorly” in elections during the last four years…

Seems pretty lucid, doesn’t it? Of course, Wadhams doesn’t want to get into pesky social issues (like abortion) for obvious reasons even though they’ve always been at the core of Senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s agenda, and Jessica Corry spent the last few years doggedly waging an unpopular and generally unsuccessful campaign against “liberal bias” at Colorado public colleges. Now she’s heading up the proponent side of a statewide ballot initiative attacking affirmative action programs, about as sticky a social issue as you can find (not so much if you’re white, point taken).

And isn’t there some kind of hardcore abortion thing on the ballot this year?

Bottom line: yeah, good advice, too bad they won’t be able to take it.

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29 thoughts on “Wadhams: Dobson Is So Yesterday”

    1. No one should believe that they are down playing the social issues that have destroyed the GOP in CO and nationally.

      If Schaffer is elected, he will be shrill on social issues, even if nobody is listening.

      1. Dick Wadhams or your lying eyes?

        You’re right. They tell The Denver Post (and by extension a general audience) social conservatism is passe, while reassuring hardcore social conservatives they won’t be forgotten.

  3. That’s the remarkable thing about this. Some social conservatives recognize that many GOP pols are simple opportunists on their issues. SoCon key policies can’t be hitched too closely to a party of incompetent warmongers.

    Jessica Peck Corry’s remarks show that libertarianism in fact drives many mid-level party members and pundits. SoCons need to stop being useful idiots for GOP pols whose lip-service to social conservatism masks an unwillingness to make substantive arguments for such positions.

    Oh, re: white women and affirmative action, Allan Carlson has done some interesting work showing how feminists co-opted the endeavor originally meant for racial minorities.  

  6. The reason Corry lost her own race is that she framed herself as a moderate.  There was no distinction between her and the Democrat on the social issues.

    Good way to play them Jessica.  If Republicans follow her advice they will certainly lose.

    But what do I care I am an anarchist anyway.

    We still haven’t organized a party yet.  Go figure.

    1. And when Wadhams loses the Senate race and McCain loses the Presidential race they will blame social conservatives for not showing up at the pols.

    2. During the Spanish Civil War, the anarcho-syndicalists not only organizing a fighting Brigade, Durutti’s if I recall correctly, but administered the government of Catalonia.  If ever there was an oxymoron in politics, that was it but they made it work.  

  7. The Dobson and social conservative points were taken from a 42-minute PoliticsWest webcast, during which Dick Wadhams pulled some familiar chestnuts from his bag of untruths and offered some new ones.

    Colorado Media Matters  runs down the state GOP chairman’s preverications. They include the usual  nonsense about Mark Udall’s address and flat-out  distortions of Bill Ritter’s executive order authorizing employee partnerships.

    Then there’s this pearl:

    … if we can make the case that the Democrats have stopped domestic exploration for the last 20 years — which they have — and that that has contributed to the rise of price, in the price of gasoline, and that Republicans have fought against that, I think that is gonna be a big shift in the debate.

    Since this falsehood seems to be a hoary old crutch for many on this site, it’s worth quoting CMM’s response in detail:

    … according to the federal government’s Energy Information Administration, “domestic exploration” has not “stopped.” The EIA has reported that 49,147 crude oil, natural gas, and dry development wells were drilled in the United States in 2007, the highest annual count since 1985. In fact, the annual number of development wells drilled in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2002, according to EIA data.

    (The CMM  story has links to each of the facts cited above and below.)

    Wadhams can’t even claim parochial disconnect. (Perhaps he can’t remember he’s in Colorado, not Virginia or South Dakota?) CMM reports:

    … in Colorado alone the active oil and gas well count has increased nearly every month since January 2002, and the state has “experienced a sixfold increase in drilling permits since 1999,” according to a May 18 New York Times Magazine article.

    Wadhams also comes up with this whopper, when, as CMM reports, he

    … repeatedly referred to Schaffer’s Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Mark Udall (Eldorado Springs), as a “Boulder liberal,” even asserting that “[i]t really is on his birth certificate … I checked. Our research department verified that.”

    Problem is, their “research department” (Dick Wadhams’s fevered imagination?) loses out to the facts:

    Udall was born in Tucson, Arizona, according to The Washington Post and Udall’s congressional website, and graduated from high school there.

    Floundering in this sea of lies, Wadhams’s comments about Dobson may as well be pure fantasy. It’s a good question: After fracturing the truth so often for so long, does Wadhams even know anymore when he’s making things up?

    Watch the PoliticsWest interview for yourself:

    1. The “[i]t really is on his birth certificate … I checked. Our research department verified that” line is so specific, he can’t back away from it, all he can do is throw a staffer under the bus.

      What a liar.

    2. that a fact like a birth certificate would be mindlessly simple to verify.  Just because they are scared of those shiny tubes doesn’t mean everyone else is.  Is lying the only thing they have left?  Does anyone know what an original conservative thought looks like anymore?  They can’t take care of the economy.  They are incompetent in foreign relations.  They will stick a knife in the back of an evangelical as soon the voting booths are closed.  This is really crazy to make up lies about a birth place in the hopes that 1980’s epitaphs have somehow retained some mojo to scare people.  If Udall wasn’t so ashamed of being a Democrat, he could kick the crap out of these people with their silly labels.  What a shame the guy is so nutless.  

      1. It’s funny, Bob Schaffer’s sponsor company, Aspect Energy, has a wholly owned subsidiary called Ascend Geo, LLC, which basically makes a device called The Ultra (a word Aspect appears to have trademarked). This gizmo is used for — wait for it — domestic oil and gas exploration.

        The intelligent design offers acquisition contractors and oil and gas companies a flexible and realistic approach to higher density seismic imaging. … The system is an integral tool in Aspect Energy’s development of their global resource plays in the US, Central America, and Hungary.

        Not very wise marketing this doo-dad if the Democrats have “stopped” domestic exploration since the Reagan Administration. Does Schaffer’s oil company know something Wadhams doesn’t?

        Source: http://www.aspectenergy.com/in…

          1. That’s wireless seismic imaging device, Pilgrim.

            And no one must let Dick Wadhams know it exists. It will destroy his entire worldview.

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