MA GOP chair Jenn Nassour’s struggle to keep her job has taken a turn for the very odd.
In defending her performance, Nassour said it wasn’t her job to secure wins for the likes of Baker and Connaughton.
“I think it’s unfair for them to blame anyone but the candidate and their campaign staff (for the losses),” Nassour said. “The party chair has nothing to do with the candidate’s loss.”
Right, exactly! The party chair’s job has nothing to do with helping the party’s candidates win elections. Rather, the party chair’s job is all about … um …
Seriously, is this not the strangest thing a party chair has ever said? On Team Blue, Dem chair John Walsh masterminded a massive GOTV effort that led directly to the victories of every Democratic statewide and congressional candidate. He also took responsibility for the Scott Brown debacle. That is how it’s done. If Nassour doesn’t want the buck to stop with her in good times and in bad, maybe party chair isn’t the right job. Just sayin’.
When I spoke with Nassour this weekend, the subject of the statewide races came up. At one point, I said that we hadn’t HAD any congressional seats since the days of Margaret Heckler (yes, I remembered Blute and Torkildson later, but that was what I said), and we hadn’t had any Constitutional offices for even longer – except Governor. We did the BEST in the Legislative races in over 10 years, and THAT was most important to me. I also said that blaming her for no statewide sweep would be like me blaming HER for the idiocy of Tim O’Brien.
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p>That cracked her up. ‘What?”, I asked. “No”, she replied, “that’s just really funny, considering some other stuff, that’s all…”
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p>I wish we could see how the question that garnered that reply was framed, as I know that Nassour DOES take winning seriously; the response printed may be somewhat out of context.
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p>As for the rest of the story, about November. There is a procedure to oust a chair, and it includes placing such a vote on the agenda and notice for the meeting to alert members that it will be taken up. McCarthy hadn’t asked for an agenda item, much less a meeting notice, so the Parliamentarian ruled him out of order. He than asked for an impromptu vote of ‘no confidence’, but it was pointed out to him that there was no such provision in the bylaws for such a vote to be taken (which is too bad, as a vote like that would have demonstrated how small a faction McCarthy had behind him). McCarty was not ‘silenced’ as his backers claim, but spoke at great length. He merely was denied the chance to take an improper vote.
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p>Several state committee members have observed that not bothering to read the bylaws when staging a palace coup is not the best recommendation for a campaign for Chair. And as far as I know, there is no other candidate.
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p>For shame!
From the second story David linked to:
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p>It’s quotes like this that make it seem that Nassour is not particularly confident in keeping her job. If she was confident, like Walsh, she would not say idiotic comments awkwardly aimed at making herself look better, such as “I don’t look at anything from this election cycle as a negative.” Really? The fact that your party lost the marquee state race? All constitutional offices? All 10 congressional seats? 20% of the Republican caucus in the Senate? All in a great year for Republicans nationally, mind you. And it’s also pretty clear that the party chair bears some responsibility for “the candidate’s loss” when the chair pumps a good deal of money in the race — and when she would have been using a Baker victory as her key re-election mantra.
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p>In fairness, though, MA GOP chair isn’t a particularly great job to have, because victories will be few and far between for Republicans in the Commonwealth in the foreseeable future. The reason has a lot less to do with who is party chair than with the actions of Republicans in Washington. As long as Washington Republicans maintain the Southern-fried radical conservatism they’ve maintained for the past 15 years or so, that will continue to taint local Republicans.
Hoya – do you realize this is the first time in decades that we even FIELDED candidates for all the constitutional offices? (And wouldn’t have now, without the record-breaking audacity of Jim McKenna!). That even now, we fielded only 9 of the Congressional races? (Which puts us PERFECTLY in line for 2012!). And IMO, those races – some of them close like Mary Z. – were what enabled us to DOUBLE the size of the house caucus.
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p>It is worth noting that this is only the FIRST non-Bush election cycle. And that the Mass. Dems have largely a record of corruption to run on, so as the – Look Over THERE! WASHINGTON! EEEK! – campaign strategy loses effectiveness, we can expect even greater gains in the future.
Though surely you’d agree this was hardly a breakout year for the MA GOP. Not only did all of those fielded candidates lose — including highly touted Charlie Baker and Mary Z. against their flawed Democratic opponents — but the doubling of the state House caucus is less impressive when one notes that (1) they only went from 16 to 32…out of 160, and (2) they somehow managed to lose a seat in the state Senate.
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p>My point is not to deny that there were a few (but only a few, if you also include Sen. Brown’s victory earlier as well as some local victories, particularly in the Worcester area) silver linings for the MA GOP this year. But we have to wait and see whether they can hold even these limited victories in a presidential election year. If Scott Brown loses, and the Republicans in the state House give back some of their 2010 gains, then clearly 2010 was not the start of much of anything for the state Republican party. If, on the other hand, they build upon their state House gains and re-elect Sen. Brown, then you might plausibly make an argument that things are looking up for the MA GOP. I probably don’t have to state which of the two scenarios I think is more likely in a presidential year.
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p>And I’m also not sure what the “record of corruption” you’re referring to is. I’m not aware of anything that taints the entire MA Democratic party as opposed to a few individual members. In any case, if I was in charge of one of the major state parties in Massachusetts and you gave me the choice of either (1) being weighed down by vague accusations of corruption or alternatively (2) being weighed down by the actions of the national party, I’d choose the former every time. The “Washington, EEEK!” strategy works when members of the national Republican party give us so much material to work with.
What they did in the house — while not overly impressive — was significant. We’ll want to make sure they don’t build on those results, because it’s building their bench up.
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p>This is true, to the extent that the bench is sane and doesn’t mirror the US HoR which is said to be set to ‘going off the rails on the crazy train.’ I forget the cite, but it’s something on the order of ‘120% more crazy than the ’94 Congress,which was the craziest on record.’
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p>Now, you may say “but this is just the state house in Ma, and it bears little resemblance to the HoR” and you might be right. That’s sorta the test, isn’t it? To what does the present ‘bench’ aspire?? The present starters or sanity?
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So, I guess sweeping environmental reform that puts us in place to lead the nation, balancing budgets in the worst of times while protecting local aid as much as possible, passing sweeping pension and ethics reform, and reducing taxes on small businesses, while ending some egregious corporate tax loopholes is franks and beans…
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p>Yeah, there’s corruption in politics. Shocker. As the public finds out, it gets weeded out and we give the population an opportunity to toss out the corrupt pols at least every two years, if the courts and/or public pressure don’t do it sooner. Bottom line is the public face of our party, the Governor, has been at the forefront of combating corruption problems across the Commonwealth and will continue to do so. We wouldn’t have had the sweeping ethics and pensions reform without it, and god knows the probation department reform will be better off with him on the job.
Massachusetts Democrats have completely overwhelmed the Massachusetts GOP in the legislature for decades. Saying that none of the sixteen GOP state representatives or four state senators have been caught (yet) is stating the obvious. Since the ratio has been about 100 to 1 (or worse) for an eternity, and since there have been about half a dozen prosecutions of Democrats, sheer probability suggests that there won’t be GOP prosecutions for a long time (perhaps stomv can offer the statistical specifics).
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p>On the other hand, the performance in the Governor’s office has demonstrated that the GOP has more than its share of skeletons. The intimate ties between William Weld and Bechtel come to mind.
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p>Besides, the GOP has a natural advantage — since its right-wing scions own the federal government, own the prosecutors, and own the media, it simply legalizes whatever crimes it commits.
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p>An enormous amount of taxpayer money was paid directly to Richard Cheney’s family business — Halliburton — as a direct consequence of Richard Cheney’s self-serving decision to invade Iraq. Similar volumes of taxpayer money have flowed into Blackwater and the many defense contractors who have profited so handsomely from our illegal invasion of Iraq and misadventures in Afghanistan. The federal government has conducted a truly staggering corporate welfare program for the defense industry for a decade.
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p>The sudden disinterest from the Democrats in prosecuting any of these flagrant crimes (including war crimes) provides compelling evidence of the extent to which the federal government has been sold to the right-wing. Party affiliation doesn’t matter; we’re talking business now, and business trumps politics every day of every week.
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p>I encourage the GOP to be very cautious about citing “corruption” in their effort to resuscitate their moribund Massachusetts presence.
I don’t find Halliburton, or national politics, to be relevant to this discussion, which is about state politics. Except maybe for “look, over there!” subject changing.
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p>Locally, having an opposition in sufficient numbers to provide meaningful oversight of the majority would be an unmitigated positive development. That opposition need not be the GOP, but, in reality there is no other alternative. Indeed, it might even spur the Democrats to exercise their majority to rein in the scoundrel GOP governors when they come along.
I apologize for the distraction.
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p>I mean only to emphasize that whatever limited success the Massachusetts GOP had in the most recent election cycle was funded, to a great extent, by national GOP interests. These national interests drive the Massachusetts GOP even farther to the right.
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p>Massachusetts is, thankfully, better educated and more rational than the nation as a whole (and therefore more “liberal”). That reality means that candidates of a Massachusetts GOP dependent on outside funding are never going to be elected “in sufficient numbers to provide meaningful oversight of the majority.”
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p>A rightward-moving Massachusetts GOP is going to lose, not gain, local elected offices.
All true.
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p>I’m not sure that the limited success was caused by the national party, so much as it happened in spite of the national party.
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p>I thought that you were issuing a defense of our corrupt local Democrats by pointing out corrupt national Republicans;
I have never and hopefully will never defend corrupt politicians of any party. I have always said that each episode of Democratic corruption makes it that much harder for all of us to accomplish the changes that we so desperately need.
Those ‘vast’ national assets? Only given to the Congressional candidates. The state party didn’t even get any cash, just some in-kind. So the candidate committee shrugged, soldiered on – and won. Without that national help.
Is the Republican Governors’ Association a massive scam, then?
Perhaps I misunderstood….thought you meant that Republican national organizations hadn’t supported Baker.
First of all, “vast” is your word, not mine.
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p>Surely you don’t seriously claim that the local GOP candidates didn’t benefit from the media attention, campaign spots, and buzz generated by the attention of the national party (including the RGA).
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p>Twice a tiny number is still a tiny number. The Massachusetts GOP was and remains a tiny minority party. It is out of step with Massachusetts, out of ideas, and apparently out of money. A party who fields candidates like Jack E. Robinson, Bill Hudak, and Jeff Perry deserves to lose. A party who runs gubernatorial campaigns like those run “for” Kerry Healy and Charlie Baker deserves to lose.
To my rather limited understanding, the job of a party chair is to more or less bully the state committee into not screwing things up too badly, serve as a public face for media looking for comment on broad political trends as opposed to specific races, coordinate party action, and keep the money flowing.
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p>Walsh was the campaign manager for Deval in 2006, so certainly deserves credit for his election. In 2010, he did a great job co-ordinating all the Democratic campaigns in the state.
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p>Given strong-than-usual results for non-gubernatorial constitutional offices, and an increase in legislative seats, it could be argued that Nassour didn’t do too badly. Baker’s loss isn’t hugely her fault; I doubt she ordered its disastrous posture relative to Cahill, and its slogan-per-week approach.
It’s hard to place blame on the state GOP apparatus when the over-reaching GOP governors were mucking about this summer, and Baker–bland as white bread–accepted the worst GOP advice available and pursued an Ahabian mission to kill off Moby Tim who, once harpooned, flopped around, in court and out, and helped sink their bad ship lollipop.
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p>Doubling the number of GOP in the statehouse, however, is good for the GOP. If some of these folks–some of whom are bound to be reasonable–develop, the GOP will field more credible candidates for statewide office in the future.
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p>PP might be able to tell us if the Mass GOP experiences some tension between its hard and the more moderate right? Aside from my blue-collar, teapartyish town, no one was thrilled with GOP candidates in my neck of the woods. Of course, the tree lean far to the left in my neck of the woods.
It’s possible to be a disastrous chair whose bacon is saved by other people, or a great one dealing with idiots all ’round. I’m sure insider Republicans (such as PP) know the story far better than I do, so I hesitate to go by the results of the gubernatorial race.
one must bear in mind PP’s warm feelings toward her party’s gubernatorial candidate.
I’m just saying that the causal chain between Nassour’s competence and Baker and Connaughton’s electoral outcomes isn’t firm enough for me to think it’s the basis for hire/fire.
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p>One good question, for instance, is what if any role did Nassour play in shutting Mihos out of the primary? That drove some people away from the MassGOP for the last election, I suspect.
I thought you’d enjoy my delicate phrasing.
Your description of what a party chair should do would certainly be correct circa 2006. However, after what Walsh has done, and what Dean did nationally, good chairs going forward are going to be recognized more for what they can do on the field and how that relates to winning than they will rolling in the cash. McAuliff could raise big $$, but that didn’t make him a good chair. Dean was a fantastic chair, but raising money was not the ends to his means, it was the means to his ends.
the awesome brain trust of O’Brien, Gorka & Gray surely gets the lion’s share of the credit for turning a very promising candidate into an also-ran. But for Nassour to claim that her job has nothing to do with winning elections – especially the statewide, top-of-the-ticket variety … well, that’s a bit hard to swallow.
I’d ask the complementary question: what was John Walsh’s role in Deval Patrick’s win? Answer: it was indirect, yet substantial and I’d argue essential. Party chairs can, and should, help their candidates win. Otherwise they are pretty much useless.
that’s what jumped out at me. What did Nassour coordinate exactly? She just sat there and did nothing while Walsh saved seats with the GOTV effort. Republicans acknowledged that they got their heads handed to them with Walsh’s efforts. Trust me, there were plenty of seats out there for the taking. I think that’s what you are looking for in a party chair.
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p>Not, ain’t my fault.
it demonstrates that it can win one statewide constitutional office or a Congressional seat during GOP-favorable times. For the Mass GOP to be shut out of all the statewide constitutional offices and not to be able to elect one of its candidates to Congress this year, demonstrates that the citizens of the state still aren’t buying the “old wine in new bottles” that Ms. Nassour and her Mass GOP colleagues continue to try to sell to the generally savvy Bay State electorate.
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p>The fact that the GOP presence and influence in the upcoming 2011-2012 session of the Legislature has “progressed” from virtually non-existent to anemic should NOT be a cause for legitimate celebration among Mass GOP partisans. I understand about the need to “grade on a curve,” when it comes to the Mass GOP, but, at this point, the evaluative correction necessary to laud “their representation gains” in the Legislature becomes so extreme as to render it and the Mass GOP as practically meaningless.
This makes it sound like it has been a hundred years. They had a number of statewide constitutional offices throughout the 90s, including the governor’s office through 2002. So they’ve been shut out for slightly longer than Democrats were shut out in Washington last decade.
the Democrats had veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature. That’s really where the GOP’s irrelevance has been most noticeable. Obviously, there was nothing comparable to that in Washington.
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p>Now, of course it’s true that the one brightish spot for the MA GOP this cycle was picking up a few seats in the state House (despite, amazingly, losing one in the Senate). If that trend continues, it will be an important one. At the moment, though, it’s impossible to say whether it’s important, or just a blip. And you have to admit that losing every statewide office, plus every congressional seat, in a year like 2010, was an impressive feat.
But it’s pretty clear what the overall trends have been. The fact that the Republicans had some success in addition to holding the Governor’s office in the early- to mid-1990s is not particularly relevant now, given how much the Republican Party has changed since the 1994 elections.
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p>With Rockefeller Republicans largely wiped away, many northeastern moderates have shifted their allegiance to the Democrats. What the MA GOP has not yet demonstrated is that they can consistently overcome the baggage of the ideological orientation of their national party — even when they run more “moderate” candidates (like Baker-Tisei) or even non-ideological candidates (like Mary Z.).
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p>Eddie’s point is well-taken — for the Republicans to become a viable force in Massachusetts politics, they have to find a way to adjust to the new reality of the national Republican Party of the past 15 years. Getting shut out of all the statewide constitutional offices and congressional seats in a extremely strong Republican year nationally certainly isn’t favorable evidence that they’ve figured out how to do so yet.
I also think that the trend has been an increasingly corrupt majority in the Great and General Court.
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p>In my view, most of their present problem stems from Romney’s repudiation of the Rockefeller Republicans. That is, in his bid for national office, he truly did an awful lot of damage to the local party. That is going to be a difficult breach to repair, but its repair– and a corresponding shift in the statehouse in favor of the GOP– would be very beneficial to the commonweal.
What’s your problem? In other news, Democrats have controlled the statehouse for the past year or two.
I pointed out the early- to mid-1990s because that was really the last time the MA GOP had anything resembling sustained success not just in the Governor’s offices but in other statewide offices (and congressional districts) as well.
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p>Since that time, the Republicans have had little success in offices apart from Governor. That’s why I said: “The fact that the Republicans had some success in addition to holding the Governor’s office in the early- to mid-1990s is not particularly relevant now.”
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p>Seems pretty clear to me, unless you think success is consistently holding 20% or fewer of the state legislative seats and being shut out of all constitutional offices and congressional seats (while managing to pick Governors who do next to nothing for party development). Anyone who believes that I’d welcome to be MA GOP chair!
Governor “Three-Day Work Week” Weld, Gov. Paul “The Tout” Cellucci, Acting Gov. Jane “Helicopter” Swift, and MIA Gov. Mitt “Straight from Hollywood casting” Romney, who still dreams of the presidency, Mitt Romney, himself. None of these GOP governors made any significant to build the Mass GOP into a viable and competitive statewide political party.
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p>With the exception of Weld’s first term, the Democrats enjoyed veto-proof majorities in both branches of the legislature throughout these Mass GOP governors’ respective tenures and only two members of the Mass. Congressional delegation were part GOP for a couple of terms during that time period. If GOP partisans believe 1991-2007 represent a period of GOP ascendancy in the state to be aspired to in the current political environment, well, as a Democrat, I just can’t get worked up about the very modest gains made by the GOP in the legislature this year.