March 31, 2009 09:23 PM UTC

Lamborn, Wadhams: Don't Change a Thing

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• by: Colorado Pols

An AP report from the weekend sure to warm the heart of any Colorado Democrat. What did it mean to recommit this month to the same GOP leadership who ran the party into such a stark minority in so few years?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

“There is hope on the way,” said Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn, whose district includes Colorado Springs.

Democrats hold seven of the state’s nine seats in Congress, Lamborn pointed out. “We can bring that back, though.”

The question is how.

So far, the party seems uninterested in major changes. Party insiders overwhelmingly re-elected Chairman Dick Wadhams to another two-year term. The vote came even though Wadhams presided over the disastrous 2008 races and managed the negative and failed Senate campaign of former Rep. Bob Schaffer.

Most agree with Wadhams’ insistence that the GOP’s miserable 2008 came because of the unpopularity of then-President Bush and national Republicans, not missteps by Colorado Republicans.

“We don’t need to rethink our identity at all. [Pols emphasis] Colorado remains a center-right state,” said John Andrews, who was president of the state Senate when his party lost control of the chamber in 2004…

The article goes on to describe Ken “Tancredo Lite” Buck’s ideas about “reviving the brand,” and Bob Beauprez’s “let’s-go-get-’em feeling.” There is a little part in there with defeated chairman candidate Tom Stone wistfully noting that the party is “focused on the negative” and needs to engage more broadly in differing areas of the state, but that was in his concession speech, wasn’t it?

The only thing that could make it worse for reasonable Republicans to see the last three cycles’ losers on stage for 2010 is to hear them proclaim “we don’t need to rethink our identity.” Like Albert Einstein famously said, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Except when it’s John Andrews and Dick Wadhams–the crowd goes wild!

The simple fact is, you cannot attribute Democratic success in Colorado last year to national forces any more than you could 2004’s original shift of Colorado from red to blue (or 2006, for that matter). As we’ve been warning for over four years now, the Colorado Republican Party has shifted further right in response to repeated, increasingly lopsided defeats, in a misguided belief that taking an even harder, more dogmatic line would make voters, above all skeptical of any dogmatic hard line…less skeptical. This was the cardinal error that more than any other factor has cost the Republicans their majorities at all levels of Colorado government. A legacy carried on by Dick “Punk You For Bob Schaffer” Wadhams–and thanks to 500 party insiders a week and a half ago, it’s the same philosophy set to govern the GOP’s strategy into the next election cycle.

It’s frequently claimed that we hammer Colorado Republicans out of partisanship, but if they were to ever actually listen–not to us, whatever, but to so many in their own party who have said everything above repeatedly in private conversation–they could have a chance at real recovery in our independent-plurality state. Fact is most Democrats we know would really prefer Republicans didn’t take our advice, finding their present wide majority margins to be, you know, satisfactory.