When Keith Downey takes over today as the chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota, he will be several steps ahead of where his predecessor, Pat Shortridge, started when he volunteered for the job in 2011.
Based on the convention of the party’s state central committee over the weekend in Bloomington, it appears that the party has made a few strides in regaining its self-esteem. Downey, in optics and verbiage, tried to convey the message that this is not your father’s GOP.
Before the delegates took the vote, Downey referred to the perception that Republicans care little for the needy. “We will link arms with them and we will walk out of [poverty] with them,” he said in a speech to delegates.
His team of nominators included a student, a stay-at-home mom who said she was “sitting in the middle,” an African-American delegate from 6th congressional district and the chair of the Hispanic GOP assembly.
But while offering those individuals as witnesses to his inclusiveness, Downey insisted labels do not matter to him. “I’m pretty done with factions. I’m not really into hyphenated Americans and I’m not really into hyphenated Republicans,” he told the crowd and then invoked the names of Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln.
Downey won 228 of the possible 344 delegate votes.
Delegates were in no mood to be reflective about stunning election losses or the party’s precarious financial position. They picked only a few nits about party rules. Ron Paul’s name was not uttered publicly. With Downey, they chose the shortest path to party unity.
State Rep. Kurt Zellers, the former speaker of the House who lost the majority in 2012, suggested that DFL dominance sparked pragmatism among party activists.
“One of the best things that has united us as a group, whether it’s first-time delegates or long-time delegates, is total DFL control,” he said at the GOP’s state central committee meeting, where he was an observer, not a delegate.
Downey agreed. “There’s nothing like losing an election and seeing the results of that to steel your resolve and get you excited.”
Still, there remain divisions that may become more pronounced as the Republican Party moves to endorse candidates for four statewide offices and the U.S. Senate. Downey said he expects those races to draw primary challengers. And although he supports moving the primary to June, as do many DFLers, he said the party would fully support candidates who receive the party endorsement at local and state conventions.
MinnPost photo by Brian HallidaySupporters of Keith Downey cheering their candidate during Saturday’s state central committee convention.
There is also that pesky seven-figure debt. Shortridge pared the debt from $1.9 million accrued under the chairmanship of Tony Sutton to $1.6 million. Downey won’t predict he will eradicate the rest of the debt, but said he has a plan of attack. He said he would start by “partnering” with political action committees and independent-expenditure groups in terms of funding candidates and races. As for the party itself, he said, “there are a lot of people, major donors and minor donors, who’ve been sitting on the sidelines and I hope that with the positive momentum that we got, we can go out and execute a plan across all levels and restore giving to the party.”
Downey gave Shortridge an appreciative parting shot for putting the party on surer footing. “We’re no longer in the ICU; we’re ready for the rehab,” he said.
Shortridge gave Downey a veiled prediction of what he’s about to face: “The two happiest words in the English language are ‘former chairman.’”
GOP And The Poor
“We will link arms with them and we will walk out of [poverty] with them,” he said in a speech to delegates.
How much do you want to bet they won’t change their message and tact one bit except to prefix their messages with “We feel the surest way to…”?
“We feel the best way to get people out of poverty is to give tax breaks to the job creators.”
“We feel the surest way to economic prosperity is for government to get out of the way of businesses.” (e.g. cut regulations.)
“We feel the best way to help the poor is to cut them off Welfare so they learn to stand on their own two feet.”
I hope no one minds if I don’t hold my breath waiting for real and substantial changes in the GOP. I’m partial to blue in my political leanings, not the color of my face.
Downey’s task is going to be like herding cats. Good luck getting to go where you want them to go. The Republicans no longer have a party. They have a copious number of groups who all want it their way or they won’t participate. What once was a party is now all of these splinter groups, lead by political zealots, getting together in one place, but it isn’t a party. The Republicans are finding out that the best of leadership, ideas, and a sense of common purpose can’t happen when everybody isn’t involved. Those with leadership skills have been driven out of the party via purity tests. It is going to be a long trip through the political wilderness before the Republicans can call themselves a party once again, if ever.
Downey must have looked pretty hard for an African-American and Hispanic in that group, to judge from those in the photo above.
A party that has devolved into a “no compromise” party has few places to go, other than irrelevance or totalitarianism.
My prediction?
The MNGOP will return beating the “abortion” drum louder than ever. It’s the only social issue that remains a safe one for them. It is their only truly uniting principle at this time.
It’s hard to continue to motivate the general public into a spirited defense of the 1% and companies with record profits and denigrate the demographics that they need to remain viable.
Job creation
One of the many things Republicans don’t realize is just how many jobs are created by government programs. They also need a little less Fox News and a little more Krugman.
One of the biggest lies they spread is that
“money taken in taxes is removed from the private sector.” It is one of the most difficult lies to dislodge from the mind of an AM radio listener.
Unlike some of the 1%, the state and federal governments don’t take tax money and hide it in the Cayman Islands. They use tax money to pay people (either for work or in the form of benefits) and buy things (all sorts of things, from paper clips to airplanes).
The people who receive payments buy necessities and luxuries in the private sector. Neither the state nor federal governments run their own manufacturing plants. When they buy anything, whether it’s filing cabinets or park ranger uniforms or fighter jets, they buy it from the private sector.
But this is only one of the lies that gets bandied about in Republican media. I think that the Republican Party is losing support because it is so caught up in its own fantasy world that anyone who hasn’t been sucked in can see that the party is no longer in touch with everyday reality.
Voters see through the tokenism
It doesn’t matter if Downey found the one Republican Hispanic and African-American to nominate him. Voters see through this tokenism, especially the minorities for whom this is trying to appeal to. Once Republicans stop vilifying blacks and Hispanics, stop trying to make it harder for them to vote (this goes for young voters too), and start espousing policies that actually speak to their issues will Republicans make inroads into these voting blocs. Given the oldish, white crowd shown the picture above, I think it may take awhile still.
Curious
Neither this piece or the Strib piece that ran on Sunday tell us anything Downy. Instead they regurgitate the already well-know history of the last election and it’s aftermath. What’s the point of doing a story about the guy who’s taking over without a biography or even a discription? Why do journalists assume that the fact that they have a new chairman is the story? Isn’t who the guy is and what he’s done more indicative of where he’ll try to take the party? I’m guessing he was one of those short lived tea party guys, is that really the future of the republican party?
Team Nomination
The nominating team consisted of a student, a stay-at-home mom, an African-American delegate from 6th congressional district, and the chair of the Hispanic GOP assembly. This, of course, shows that labels don’t matter to Mr. Downey. It’s entirely coincidental that his “team” was made up of members of the groups the GOP needs to win elections again (and note that the only people who will swallow that line are the pathologically gullible, an essential component of the Republican base).
Mr. Downey has lost his moral right to criticize Democrats for pandering to special interest groups. Based on this story, he could offer courses on the subject.
Today’s MN GOP
Has yet to realize that, with our state’s eight years of deteriorating economic performance under Gov. Tim Pawlenty,…
and the pathetically poor performance of the GOP-dominated legislature in the last biennium, including their failure to enact even a single bill designed to create a single job, and the failure of their leaders to live up to even the most BASIC moral code…
not to mention the even worse economic performance of the state of Wisconsin, next door,…
where the Republicans are in charge of EVERYTHING,…
the jig is definitely up in the eyes of their fellow citizens.
Not only have they lost their formerly-dependable social issues as public opinion has moved in the other direction,…
but the public now sees those issues for what they always were, a smoke screen thrown up by the leadership of the Republican party to obscure their true agenda: to further enrich and empower the already-fabulously wealthy to extract ever greater wealth directly out of the pockets of their fellow citizens,…
by an entire collection of banking, insurance, retirement investment “reforms” and investment deregulation designed to do exactly that,…
and by denying reasonable pay and benefit increases to those working solid, regular jobs, in order to massively enrich corporate owners and managers while providing them loopholes sufficient to avoid paying the vast majority of their taxes,…
even as those same fabulously wealthy folks complained about how high their taxes were (at least on paper, if they had actually paid any of them).
Now that the curtain has been rolled back and the men behind it revealed to be who and what they are,…
(not exactly paragons of moral OR economic virtue)
NO amount of renewed smoke screening, even on the subject of abortion, is going to get the rest of us to forget what we know is behind that curtain.
Until the Republican party ceases to actually represent the party of give ME (although I am without need) more, more, more,…
make me give back less, less, less,…
and give me most of what YOU, have too (even though you have far less than I do),…
while you, out of your increasing need, bear more and more of the freight of maintaining the infrastructures that my enterprises require to make me EVEN MORE wealthy;…
until they begin to appreciate the need to provide actual benefit to their fellow citizens (instead of just providing for themselves),…
just compensation for those citizens’ labor, for instance,…
rather than just inventing new scams to further pad their own pockets,…
they will (rightfully) remain in the political wilderness.
Unless, of course, the Libertarians mount a more concerted effort to take over, in which case, Republicanism in Minnesota will be a whole new ball game,…
but not necessarily more popular with the general public.
The fact that Downey
Lost the election in his Senate district including Edina and Bloomington reflects how out of touch he is even with Republicans.
Who is Keith Downey ? Look at special interest group ratings:
See http://votesmart.org/candidate/evaluations/109187/keith-downey#.UWN-CTfviSo
You’d never know from this fluff piece who likes Mr. Downey. But if you peruse the aggregated ratings of Mr. Downey by the interest groups above, you’ll know a lot more about Mr. Downey. He is a darling of the following, nearly all of which have given him a 100% rating or very close to it, in the recent past:
Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (anti abortion)
Taxpayers League of Minnesota (Phil Krinkie, “Dr. No” himself)
National Rifle Association (everybody gotta have a sporting assault rifle)
Minnesota Majority (voter suppression, anyone?)
Minnesota Family Council (marriage restriction to one man, one woman)
Chamber of Commerce
Got a better picture now of Keith Downey ??
Same old, same old
The re-messaging of the Republican Party isn’t going to change the substance of anything that he says. The only difference is now, it’s all about “Freedom.” The old message said it was all for Jesus.
Thanks Steve T.
You told us more in two paragraphs in than either this article or the one Strib did in two pages. Was that so hard? This guy is obviously the past, not the future of the Republican party. I guess THAT’s not a story, the story is he’s the new guy.
The decline continues then
The problem is the republicans have spent decades cultivating extremism and extremist. Now that’s all they have to offer, and worse, they don’t seem to have figured out that this is their problem. They think they can re-package extremism and make it palatable, or as they’ve done in the past, hide it from voters. When extremists talk about working together they mean everyone will be disciplined into one voice. We’ll see what happens.
No New Taxes
I don’t know much about politics, but I do know about running a business. If any business was run the way the GOP wants to run the government, that business wouldn’t exist after a short period of time. If any business gets in trouble financially, it has to do two things, tighten its belt and increase revenue. A good business model is one that has a rolling budget and is flexible enough to do what is necessary to increase revenues and cut costs. Cost cutting in business can mean everything from cutting expenses for copy paper, to lay offs. Lay offs should be the last consideration because you going to lose some of your valuable human capital. The GOP however would not run a business that way. No new taxes = no increased revenue. Because the government is much like a service company, it has to consider lay offs last or they can’t provide the service. So what does the GOP do? They use the term, cut spending. Cut spending = less service. But, is less service the best and only way to balance the budget. The answer is no. One can cut a lot of spending with the government, but the GOP has been keeping increased levels at such a low amount that a hole has been dug and that hole has to e filled something to get us out of it and that something is NEW TAXES. If the GOP where the CEO of a company you were heavily invested in, would you keep them and give them a bonus, or fire them? I think the people in Minnesota spoke during the last election and most people in the state want a viable business model, not something akin to a Ponzi scheme.
Kenneth doesn’t understand
Mr. Kjer,
You don’t understand, tax cuts pay for themselves by magically increasing revenue. It only seems absurd until you realize it’s magic. Why didn’t it work? The only thing I can figure is someone somewhere put the whammy on our magic and caused a recession. I think if we ever find who did that they should be severely reprimanded.
No, no, Mr. Udstrand
As any ideologue will tell you, tax cuts haven’t fixed the budget because they weren’t steep enough. Why, if there were no taxes at all and all the state employees were unemployed, we’d be in an Ayn Randian paradise!