Republicans Eat Their Young!
Orders have just come down from Kos to post this. I have no choice:
Daily Kos: RI-Sen: NRSC goes racist: Scaaaaary brown people are invading Rhode Island. I wonder what "moderate" Lincoln Chafee thinks about this NRSC fear-mongering. Apparently, it's bad that Laffey, a real wingnut mind you, didn't put Mexicans in concentration camps as mayor of Cranston. As an aside, that's the Republican Party running ads against Republican Steve Laffey...
Nobody who is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants has any business voting Republican. Nobody.
Kos follows up:
Daily Kos: RI-Sen: NRSC puts everything into rescuing Chafee: Not only is the cash-strapped NRSC spending millions running racist ads against fellow Republican Stephen Laffey in an effort to rescue the flailing incumbent Lincoln Chafee (R), but they are sending all the bodies they can as well:
Democrats were right in 2004: the Republicans have adopted a draft. It only applies, however, to party workers employed by state victory committees in the east of the Mississippi. For many it will be worse than boot camp. They are to be sent to Rhode Island to try to rescue Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee's re-election campaign in the September 12th primary.
Workers start arriving Friday and will be charged with sorting out the mess that Washington operatives believe is the Chafee campaign. First task may be to get Republican voters to forget Chafee's erratic performance in the last two of the four broadcast debates between the incumbent and his lively challenger, Cranston mayor Stephen Laffey.
Scores of GOP workers will begin arriving this week and stay through the open primary as they search for and then try to persuade some of the 70,000 registered Republicans and several hundred thousand independent voters eligible to participate in the open primary to support Chaffee. Draftees, many of whom may be more compatible with Laffey, will be paid by their home-state committees. Food and lodging expenses will be picked up by Republican National Committee.
Keep in mind what this means: assuming this report by the Hotline is accurate, the NRSC is pulling valuable workers in important battleground states like Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania for a full two weeks.
They are weakening their effort on behalf of weak candidates to rescue one of their incumbents from a primary battle. As the Hotline blog notes, some of those NRSC's staffers won't be happy to go and work for Chafee and against Laffey. It would've been like the DSCC forcing staffers to abandon their posts in hot contested races to go work for Lieberman and against Lamont.
Redstate's Mike Krempasky is already seeing red (pardon the pun) over the NRSC's anti-Laffey spending.
This is what your money is being spent on - attack ads on behalf of Lincoln Chafee. Give me a break. We're fighting on enough fronts to keep the Senate - and this is what Liddy Dole sees as a priority. No wonder their fundraising is in the tank. If Republicans want to make a real statement about their committment to winning elections, they ought to yank her BEFORE election day. Period.
Krempasky wrote that before the NRSC redirected half of their national staff to Rhode Island. I'm sure he'll be particularly pleased at that bit of news.
