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Sunday, May 20, 2007
It wasn’t the passions, but the lack of them, at GOP confab
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia wasn’t the only place where a Republican senator drew boos from a hometown crowd over the past weekend.
Like U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss at the Georgia Republican Party’s state convention, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was booed at the South Carolina GOP convention when he defended the Senate immigration proposal. Immigration is a vexing issue for Republicans, and we can expect this won’t be the last time the base voices its displeasure over the subject.
But the smattering of boos from the back of the room as Chambliss spoke Saturday didn’t capture the atmosphere of this year’s convention as much as the silence which was the more common response.
Most of those in the audience of some 1,200 GOP faithful were willing to give Chambliss and U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson a fair hearing when they talked about the immigration compromise, but they seemed far from sold. A similar, non-committal mood greeted much of the speechifying at this, the first gathering of the Republican grassroots since the triumphant 2006 election.
State GOP conventions used to be boisterous affairs where Republicans came to argue with each other, while their leaders vainly appealed to the quarrelsome throng to put up a united front against the Democrats.
Success has changed that. Nowadays as often as not it’s the elected officials who argue with each other from the podium, leaving many in the audience feeling uncomfortably more like referees than combatants.
The Republicans listened politely to Gov. Sonny Perdue as he compared the rift between Republicans over the state budget to a good Republican family which has been successful in an insurance business with 159 agents, symbolic of the counties that would be doling out money under the House property tax refund plan.
“You may know of some marriages, frankly, that have had problems over finances,” Perdue said.
Perdue got applauded for upholding fiscal responsibility a few times, and a few minutes later House Speaker Glenn Richardson got applauded - whether by the same hands or not, we don’t know - for what he called his GREAT Plan for Georgia - “Georgia’s Repeal of Every Ad Valorem Tax.” Forget about the V.
“We’re not supposed to get along. We’re trying to get a job done, and disagreement is going to occur when you’re trying to affect change,” Richardson said.
But in both cases, the response seemed pretty tame by comparison with years past, when the Republicans looked at themselves as the insurgents milling around the castle, and not a family trying to run an insurance business. Nobody was standing up on their chairs and hollering about what anybody said.
Georgia’s Republicans “don’t need to pay our penance in the political wilderness” like the Washington Republicans, U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland warned, but they had better remember their promise to protect “the wallets of our state’s taxpayers.”
It was a stauch Calvinist message, for a congregation not very prone to do much shouting about anything.
We won’t give any scientific standing to the presidential straw poll which was announced at the close of the convention Saturday, but it says volumes about the spirit of this affair that the two top voter-getters, former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were the two Republicans on the list who aren’t actually in the race.
Hillary wins the weekend, fundraising-wise
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Early word from the Hillary Clinton camp is that she raised something like $300,000 in her two Atlanta fundraising events Saturday. That doesn’t match Barack Obama’s big fundraiser in March, but it took top honors for a busy weekend.
Republican Mitt Romney took in $250,000 Friday - that’s a lot more $2,300 checks than the 40 votes he got in the straw poll at the state GOP convention. We haven’t heard any numbers, but we understand John Edwards stuck around after his Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech Thursday night for a couple of fundraisers Friday.
The second of the Clinton fundraisers, at the home of Caribou Coffee CEO Michael Coles, drew about 200 contributors, including several notable African-American Democrats: Attorney General Thurbert Baker, Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, Valerie Jackson, Hank Aaron, Rep. Calvin Smyre, Vernon Jordan and Herman Russell.
