Greenwood Village, CO – Today the Colorado Republican Party announced its final caucus results, with Senator Rick Santorum certified as the winner of the 2012 Colorado Republican Caucuses. Across the state nearly 3,000 Republican volunteers helped facilitate a successful caucus in what will be a springboard to a Republican victory in Colorado in the general election.  Colorado Republican Party Chairman Ryan Call issued the following statement:
 
“Last night, Colorado Republicans took an enthusiastic  first step in nominating our candidate to defeat Barack Obama in November. I congratulate Senator Rick Santorum on his victory and I’m confident that no matter who our eventual nominee is, Colorado will do its part this November to elect a Republican President. Poll after poll shows that after three years of broken promises and failed economic policies, Coloradans have soured on Barack Obama, and tonight we proved that we have the momentum heading into November.”
 
 
The official results with 100% of precincts reporting are as follows:
 
Rick Santorum: 26,614 - 40.31%
 
Mitt Romney: 23,012 – 34.85%
 
Newt Gingrich: 8,445 – 12.79%
 
Ron Paul: 7,759 – 11.75%
 
Write In: 71 - .11%
 
Rick Perry: 52 - .08%
 
Jon Huntsman: 46 - .07%
 
Michele Bachmann: 28 - .04%         

Total turnout: 66,027

 WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus released the following statement regarding the state chairman election in Colorado:
 
“I would like to congratulate Ryan Call on his election to serve as state chairman for the state of Colorado. Ryan is a proven grassroots leader and I am excited to see that he will be leading our Party in such an important battleground state for 2012. Ryan understands what it takes to maintain a strong state party infrastructure and how to bring new voters into the fold. I look forward to working closely with Ryan to elect Republicans in the Centennial State and to make Barack Obama a one-term president.”

The Kit Carson County Republicans will be holding their annual Lincoln Day Dinner on Thursday, March 31, 2011, at the First St. Paul Lutheran Church, 2660 Senter Avenue, Burlington, Colorado.  The social will begin at 6:30 p.m. with the dinner being server at 7:00 p.m. by Eirington & Eirington. Our state and national congressmen will be in attendance or represented, so it’s a great opportunity to meet and visit with them. The Kit Carson County Republican women will have an auction at the end of the evening for their Kit Carson County Republican Women’s Scholarship.

The speaker for the evening will be James Humes.  Humes has written or ‘ghosted’ for five U.S. Presidents. In this talk, he reveals the secrets of White House speechwriting – whether it was for an Inaugural Address, a toast to the Queen or a plaque to be left on the moon.

Humes, a born mimic, recreates each of the Presidents in his warm and funny reminiscences. He imparts anecdotes about personal encounters with every President from Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush.

Humes is the author of the top selling How To Get Invited To The White House and the acclaimed “My Fellow Americans” – Presidential Address that Shaped History and his speech explains the problems of adjusting to each President and his style. Humes also assisted President Ford in writing his memoirs A Time to Heal.

In a talk that will make listeners both laugh and cry, Humes sketches the personalities of the Presidents (and their First Ladies) in an anecdotal style that makes history come alive.

Humes has been called “America’s foremost raconteur.” The Christian Science Monitor wrote “Humes is one of America’s top speakers.” Richard Nixon said “Humes is my Quotes-Master General.” Senator Fritz Hollings in the Congressional Record said, “Most speech writes are footnotes to history but Humes makes history.”

His autobiography CONFESSIONS OF A WHITE HOUSE GHOSTWRITER: Five Presidents and Other Political Adventures published by Regnery came out in May, 1997. The Foreword is by Julie Nixon Eisenhower. Mr. Humes, in behalf of this books, has appeared on Brian Lamb’s Booknotes, Robert Novak’s One on One, Tome Snyder’s The Late Late Show and The Osgood File on CBS.

A General Trapped In A Diplomat’s Job
Dominic Dezzutti
February 8, 2011
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2011/02/08/a-general-trapped-in-a-diplomats-job/

Dick Wadhams surprised politicians and pundits alike on Monday when he announced that he would not run for a third term as chair of the Colorado Republican Party.

Wadhams had previously announced he would run, but he said that while he figured he had the votes to win, he had tired of dealing with people who “saw conspiracies around every corner.”

It seems that Wadhams’ decision simply came down to the frustration with a major wing of his party wanting “true” conservatives, yet still desiring to win a state that is still firmly purple and moderate.

Activist Republicans in the state want to have their cake and eat it too, and that simply isn’t possible against a very competitive Democratic Party. I can certainly understand Wadhams’ issue with party activists that want the most conservative candidates in the primary, but can’t understand why those same candidates are beaten in the general election.

That would be a frustrating attitude to deal with as a party chair. But, Wadhams’ stint as party chair didn’t start out with that much frustration. In fact, it started out with much more optimism.

When Wadhams came back to Colorado to head the Republican Party, I figured he was going to snap the party into shape and get the party back on track after losing the State House. Wadhams was extremely effective as a Campaign Manager here in Colorado in the late 1990’s and his national campaign with Sen. George Allen was derailed by the candidate, not his strategy.

Frankly, despite the Allen mishap, Wadhams was coming home with a strong and competitive reputation.

However, the big problem for Wadhams was that as a party chair, he didn’t have the kind of power to create change in the trenches of the campaign that he did as a Campaign Manager.

I like to think of it like this. Gen. George Patton was one of the most effective Generals to serve in the U.S. military. He demanded a high level of performance from his troops and did his best when he was right there in the battle with his soldiers.

But if you put Patton in, say, Eisenhower’s position in World War II, he would have floundered. Without direct authority over the instant movements in the war, Patton would have failed to have the same effectiveness. He wouldn’t have been any less brilliant, the environment would have hampered his style.

Wadhams is not unlike Patton, and as party chair, Wadhams was too far from the front lines and didn’t have the direct authority over the campaigns to make the instant changes that effective campaigns need to make.

In the end, I think we will see Wadhams back in Colorado politics fairly soon. 2012 might be too soon, only because there will not be a statewide race in Colorado.

However, in 2014, Sen. Mark Udall and Gov. John Hickenlooper will both be running for re-election. That sounds like the prime opportunity for Wadhams to take his rightful place as one of the GOP’s best field generals.

That also might be enough time for GOP party activists to decide if they want truly conservative candidates, or if they want to govern. We’ve already seen that doing both really isn’t an option.

Carroll: Don't blame Dick Wadhams
By Vincent Carroll
February 9, 2011
http://www.denverpost.com/carroll/ci_17332374?source=rss

Ted Harvey is seeking the post of state Republican Party chair because he wants to "return authentic conservative leadership to the party structure," he said in his announcement.

You've got to appreciate the audacity of the word "authentic." The current party chair, Dick Wadhams, who announced Monday that he will not seek re-election, has only spent his entire career working for the likes of Bill Armstrong, Conrad Burns, Bill Owens, Wayne Allard and George Allen — and no, I don't mean the coach — with nary a political moderate in the mix.

And when Wadhams wasn't picking up a regular paycheck from one of these free-market oriented, small government officeholders, he was engineering the election of Hank Brown to the U.S. Senate, the most fiscally conservative Coloradan to sit in that body in the past few decades, or trying, unsuccessfully, to elect a conservative like Bob Schaffer to that office as well.

Or he was coordinating the upset of Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota on behalf of now-Sen. John Thune.

On Tuesday, Harvey, the Highlands Ranch senator, told me his dig about "authentic conservative leadership" wasn't really directed at Wadhams, who had intended to run for another term until he got fed up with critics blaming him for the loss of the Senate and governor races last fall. "He got us through some of the most trying times in our party's history," Harvey says of Wadhams. "Having said that, many of us believe we need new leadership" that can heal party divisions and "unite our base."
If the base splintered last fall, however, it was only in the governor's race, where a host of "authentic" grassroots conservatives saw fit to nominate a huckster with the most threadbare credentials of any major party candidate for statewide office in decades. The alternative at the time, the plagiarist Scott McInnis, was hardly a hard-core conservative, but he was no favorite of Wadhams, either — except in that particular race.

Meanwhile, the Republican base remained loyal to Ken Buck in the Senate contest. Buck's problem was that too many independent voters refused to support him after Democrats spent months portraying him, thanks in part to his own missteps, as a modern-day Archie Bunker.

"It disgusted me after the election when all of these pundits said the Democratic ground game pulled Democrats like (U.S. Sen. Michael) Bennet across the line," Wadhams told me. "We had much higher Republican turnout than the Democrats — more than 100,000 more party voters even though our registration edge was only 8,000. We had a great story. How do you think Scott Gessler and Walker Stapleton defeated incumbents (for secretary of state and treasurer)?"

Wadhams has a point. Final figures from the state show 722,356 Republicans voted, as opposed to 615,119 Democrats. Gessler and Stapleton easily outpolled Buck, as did the at-large Republican regent, Steve Bosley. And the biggest vote-getter of the day was not the likeable Democrat John Hickenlooper, cruising to victory with hardly a dollar of national GOP money spent to sully his name, but Attorney General John Suthers, another Republican. No splintering among Republicans there.

Should Republicans have done better in the legislature, and especially in the state Senate? Undoubtedly, but it will be tough sledding in those races until conservatives match the independent expenditures of the left. Yet it's not a party chair's job to drum up so-called 527 spending, unless he's angling for a stint in prison.

Still, Harvey is probably right that Republicans need new leadership given the distrust by so many Tea Party types to what they consider the Old Guard. "We need to embrace the free-market, lower taxes, patriot conservatives who are newly coming to our party and encourage and direct them on how to be effective," Harvey said.

Fair enough. If Harvey wins, he could start by reminding the newcomers that Tom Tancredo and Dan Maes together failed to match Hickenlooper's vote total, and that Buck lost in part because he spent too much of the primary pandering to some of the more controversial views on the right, such as the "fair tax" and repeal of the 17th amendment.
So hurray for party unity and fresh faces. But candidates are still going to get trounced if they can't tack to the middle when it counts.
 

Editorial: Next GOP chair needs to put an end to purity tests
Dick Wadhams' replacement will have to convince Republican voters in Colorado to accept good but "imperfect" candidates.
By The Denver Post
February 9, 2011
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_17332237

Dick Wadhams never has been one to mince words, so we shouldn't have been surprised to see him speak so frankly about the state of the Colorado Republican Party as he departs as its chairman.

"I have loved being chairman, but I'm tired of the nuts who have no grasp of what the state party's role is," he told The Post's Lynn Bartels in what you might think was a moment of candor. After all, it's not often a chair of a state party calls some of its members nuts.

But he continued on in his official press release:

". . . I have tired of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is while saying 'uniting conservatives' is all that is needed to win competitive races across the state," he said.

Even if Colorado Republicans could unite all conservatives, they still can't win. In Colorado, you need to win over a few of the moderate, unaffiliated voters and to do that you need candidates who appeal to a broader spectrum of voters.

Conservatives can win statewide. Bill Owens and Wayne Allard proved that. But you can't win over moderates if the far right wing of the party — the nuts, perhaps? — blackballs candidates simply because they once held elected office (surely they must be tainted!) or if they're perceived as being pragmatic in some way. Those voters helped sink former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton's Senate bid because she had the audacity to back Referendum C, which allowed the state to keep the revenues it already was collecting without a hike in the tax rate. Oh, the horrors!

Why does this matter to us? Because Coloradans deserve choices.

Republicans produced a gubernatorial candidate last year who may have been well-intentioned but had no business governing the state.

The next state GOP chair will have to convince party voters to drop the purity tests and accept candidates who may not be perfect but will vote their way on nearly every issue.

It won't be easy in this political environment.

RELEVANT READING

Constitutionalism - Charles Krauthammer
Upton's mission to rein in regulators - George F. Will
Keith Olbermann: The worst peacemaker on earth - National Review
Cool your own rhetoric, Congressman Perlmutter - MarkHillman.com

 

What we should expect from Republicans
 
 
As Republican majorities take the reigns of power both in Congress and in the Colorado House of Representatives, they carry the lofty expectations of their supporters alongside the inconvenient reality that Democrats still control half of the legislative branch plus the executive.

 
Practically speaking, Republicans can do only so much, but that certainly doesn't mean they are powerless.  Here's what a good strategy for the next two years might look like:
 
First, kill bad bills.  There's truth in the maxim, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."  Legislation that empowers bureaucrats or creates new opportunities for litigation simply cannot be "fixed," so kill it.
 
Taxpayers will breathe a sigh of relief if they know that certain bills are dead on arrival.  This should include tax increases, new mandates that require businesses and families to spend after-tax dollars on things bureaucrats or lobbyists think we supposedly need.
 
Republicans should also see to it that the wish lists of labor unions, trial lawyers and nanny-statists aren't worth the paper they're written on.
 
Next, govern effectively.  Republicans will be expected to work with Democrats. That's fine, up to a point, but that must be a two-way street.
 
Since neither party can get everything it wants, Republicans should repeatedly establish the principles of fiscally-responsible, taxpayer-friendly, market-oriented, pro-growth governance in every debate. Get government out of the way and unleash the productivity and creativity of the people.  Let Democrats continue to make the tired argument that politicians and bureaucrats are smarter than the rest of us.
 
At every opportunity, voters should see the contrast between pro-growth, pro-freedom policies and the bankrupt liberal agenda.  Even if Republicans don't have the votes to overturn the worst policies of recent years, it's imperative to try.
 
In Congress, Republicans have a chance to regain their credibility as the party of limited government, balanced budgets, and economic growth. They dare not squander this opportunity.
 
By requiring every piece of legislation to explain how it falls within Congress's constitutional authority, Republicans have already instituted a rule that, if adhered to, could cause a seismic shift in the political culture.  Remember when Nancy Pelosi, asked where the Constitution gives Congress authority to implement ObamaCare, responded incredulously, "Are you serious?"
 
Yes, Nancy, we are serious.
 
Spending bills must originate in the U.S. House, so Republicans can restore sanity to runaway spending which soared from $24,000 per household prior to the recession to $36,000 under the Obama budgets. Congress should require that unspent "stimulus" funds be returned and committed to deficit reduction.
 
Finally, Congress can use its oversight authority to expose arrogant bureaucrats who would choke off access to domestic oil and gas supplies, impose costly regulations on energy production, and tax or regulate the internet.
 
At the State Capitol, all bills to raise revenue must originate in the House, according to the state constitution.  Nothing that emits even a whiff of tax increase should leave the State Capitol without the constitutionally-required vote of the people.  And after more than $1 billion in surreptitious in tax and fee increases over the past four years, voters are in no mood.
 
Republican legislators should lay down a few markers:  no more "fees" that simply raise money for general government purposes, no more mandates that require consumers to buy insurance coverage they don't want or cannot afford, and no more regulations that increase the cost of energy to consumers.
 
Above all else, elected Republicans must remember: "Don't go native."
Last November, many people with different ideas and priorities voted Republican because they were sick of Democrats spending money they didn't have, growing government into a ubiquitous burden, piling debt on our children and grandchildren, and raising taxes with impunity.
 
The halls of government are full of lobbyists and bureaucrats who advocate for more government spending, more regulation and more limits on personal freedom.
 
Republicans' mission is to put taxpayers back in charge by making government serve the people - reversing the liberal inclination to make people serve government.

January 2, 2011Civility in PoliticsAs the election of 2010 becomes one for the history books, the American people sent a clear message.  They want change.  They are tired of “politics as usual,” tired of not feeling heard, and tired of an out-of-control government.  Energy is high.  People are “awake” and paying attention – and that's a good thing.  I expect that those of us who were elected on November 2 will be held to a higher standard than previous Congresses – and we should be.

As the 112th Congress gets underway, I believe we have a mandate from the American people to work towards real solutions and to do it in a respectful, civil way.  A study earlier this year by the Allegheny College found that 95% of Americans believe civility in politics is important for a healthy democracy.  87% feel that it is possible for people to disagree about politics in a respectful manner.  The American people believe – rightly so – that we can talk about the issues of our day in a way that does not involve name-calling, insults, personal attacks or shouting.

Civility is something that goes much deeper than just being nice while we talk to each other.  Rather, it is an expression of a fundamental understanding, a respect for the laws, rules and norms that guide its citizens in knowing what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior.  A society can not function without civility.  In fact, without it, society moves towards anarchy.

Some of us grew up hearing that there were two things never discussed in polite company – politics and religion.  Shying away from such important topics, however, is one of the reasons that we now see such incivility in our dialogue.  We have somehow forgotten how to talk about important topics – even emotionally charged topics – without being offensive.  We CAN disagree without being disagreeable – and we can avoid harsh personal attacks, verbal or physical.

As time has passed, we can look back ruefully at the election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, former friends and allies running against each other.  Jefferson accused Adams of being a “blind, old, toothless man” importing mistresses from France and trying to marry his daughter to the son of King George.  Adams postulated that if Thomas Jefferson won, we would see our soil soaked in blood, our nation's dwellings in flames and the nation “black with crimes.”  Stephen Douglas called Abraham Lincoln a “hatchet-faced nutmeg dealer.”  In May of 1856, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks entered the Senate chambers and beat Senator Charles Sumner so hard that the cane he was using shattered.  Thankfully, we are past those days. Hopefully, we will also be able to move past the roadblocks we hurl at each other.

We will not agree on all issues, but I look forward to an ongoing dialogue with the people of the 3rd Congressional district.  I encourage constituents to contact my offices, to connect with me through social media and to come to the regular town halls I will be holding.  Let's talk.  Our nation depends on it.