More problematic Republicans

[redbird]

Wiscon is hardly the only group that doesn’t check people’s previously published opinions carefully: the NY Republican party is trying to get its own candidate for Congress off the ballot, now that someone has found his past racist writings. (This is for northern suburbs of New York City, the district currently represented by Nita Lowey.) The candidate is now refusing to comment on his own article on the grounds that he hasn't read it recently.

I doubt the party leadership are going to be able to do this, legally: it’s too late for them to name a replacement even if they convinced him to withdraw, and “he isn’t a real Republican, philosophically” is probably not a valid legal argument. And nominating him for a judgeship, even if it’s not too late, would look worse than 'no, vote for X as a write-in' or "we've realized the Democratic incumbent isn’t that bad." The best they can do is probably to stop giving him money, withhold any get-out-the-vote help, and maybe pick a write-in candidate on the theory that while a write-in probably won't get elected, the lack of one certainly won't.

[No, this doesn’t have anything directly to do with Elizabeth Moon or Wiscon; it’s just interesting timing.]

Comments

[bibliofile]

Heh. Thanks.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Some years ago the Conservative Party in the UK discovered that its candidate for a seat had actually run about ten years earlier for the National Front, the racist party. It was too late to get him off the ballot (in the UK, candidates are chosen by local party committees, and they can fire candidates of their own will), and of course his vote was derisory, but it's kind of amazing that he hadn't been vetted.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

We had that happen the governor race before this last one. The Republican nominee, George Allen, and son of a well-known football coach, was talking to a group outside, where he saw a young light-brown man taking video (for the Democratic side, which is legal in public) and called him "macaca" twice, which means "monkey." Allen had been expected to win the race, but after that, people started looking at his history (even had a picture on his website of his office with a Confederate flag on the wall) and Kaine won.

Our current governor is Republican at least partly because we had a quiet Democratic nominee. However, he's made a lot of Civil War and black folk errors that make even conservatives dislike him. Sometimes it's good that Virginia governors can only do one term at a time.