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This McCain Democrat
phenomenon -- sane people
who normally wouldn't be caught within shooting distance of
Republicans suddenly participating in GOP caucuses and
primary elections -- seems to be contagious.
Here in Chaffee County, we've just seen the emergence of
DeLuca Democrats.
We've got an incumbent Republican
county commissioner, Frank McMurry, a rancher who's seldom
met a development he didn't like. He's up for re-election
this year.
A couple of weeks ago, a Salida businessman named Joe DeLuca announced that he would challenge McMurry for the Republican nomination. DeLuca gave several reasons for running, like seeking a more diversified local economy and more openness in government, but it was his call for improved growth management that captured a lot of attention.
How much attention?
I was talking with a friend one day, a reliable
Yellow-Dog Democrat. The topic turned to a prominent
faction in the local GOP, and I started bemoaning
Republican hypocrisy with a rant about people who call
themselves conservatives
but who have never been
known to conserve
anything we like about living
here.
Be careful here, Ed,
he chuckled. You're
talking to one of them, now.
As soon as I recovered from the sudden attack of apoplexy, I pressed for details about his conversion. Did he just inherit some money? Discover the joys of golf? Decide to subdivide his property?
Nothing like that. The Republican nomination is just
about the election in the county commissioner race this
year. The best way to make sure McMurry doesn't get
re-elected is to make sure he isn't on the ballot. So a
bunch of us changed our party registration so we can go to
the Republican precinct caucuses and then the county
assembly. And if we can't deny him renomination there,
we'll be able to vote for DeLuca in the primary.
This sounded like a lot of work, I observed.
It is,
he said, but remember in college when
we were marching for and against this and that, and they
kept telling us to work within the system? See, we're all
grown up now and we're working within the system instead of
demonstrating or smashing windows.
Did that party switch also mean that he was going to vote for McCain in the Colorado presidential primary next month?
Well, it's going to be fun to get to participate in
the only interesting presidential primary contest in years,
but I'm voting for the Shrub, not McCain.
McCain is a conservative Republican, I noted.
Yeah, and he could beat either Gore or Bradley, and
hey, I've just changed my registration, not my attitudes.
I'll vote for the Shrub because he'll be the weakest
Republican candidate. Al Gore would be able to hammer him
like an anvil, and I sure don't want a Republican president
appointing judges -- Clinton's are bad enough.
That friend wasn't the only DeLuca Democrat.
During the next fortnight, just about every registered
Democrat or Independent I knew here was telling me about
changing registration to Republican and urging me to do the
same.
This exercise in party-building
hasn't exactly
thrilled the local GOP establishment. They've responded in
much the same way as the national GOP establishment has to
the McCain primary campaign, with complaints that the wrong
kind of people are participating, and so the purity of the
Republican Party is threatened.
But this sounds a little hollow coming from Bush supporters. The state parties wrote the rules about who could participate in the primaries, and Bush knew what the rules were, and could have campaigned accordingly in New Hampshire and Michigan.
He didn't. And when you read the comments from the Bush
camp, it sounds as though there was a script, with
firewalls
erected in South Carolina and Michigan by
Bushies in high places to insure that the script would be
followed.
Perhaps we're seeing the limits of insider political manipulation. It all comes down to voters, and this year, voters seem to want to have a say in who gets the nominations.
That's kind of exciting, to see real contests rather than the customary coronation of whoever has the most money and endorsements. On the other hand, it is rather depressing that this happens so rarely that when it does happen, it's big news.
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