One Suggestion for the Delaware GOP

After last night's primary, I don't want to discuss whether or not O'Donnell is a good idea or if Castle would be better overall, even with his faults. What I'd like to do here is look ahead and try to make a suggestion of how the Delaware Republican Party could possibly take a step towards healing the rift between the pragmatists and the purists.

My idea? Pull your heads out of your asses and reschedule your convention/primary system.

As a resident of Iowa, I had no idea of how things are done in The First State, other than a vague thought that their political system should be somewhat similar to what our Republican Party uses here in Corn Country. In Iowa, we had our Primary in early June, with the State Convention occuring about three weeks later. Was it perfect? No. Supporters of Bob VanderPlaats (self-described Tea Party candidate who has DEEP ties to the Huckabee camp) went after former Governor Branstad (alleged moderate) HARD in the primary, and then after Branstad won 51-40 (another candidate got 9%), staged somewhat of a minor coup by trying to force Branstad to replace his Lt. Governor nominee with BVP at the convention. This move failed, and as far as I know, members of the BVP camp are grudgingly coming back to the Branstad campaign, mainly because Iowans have one of the dumbest Governors in the Nation, Chet Culver (D). It's easy to come together behind a man who makes Governor LaPetomaine from Blazing Saddles look competent by comparison...but I digress. What I wanted to get across here is that the Iowa Republican Party had a fight in the primary, and then proceeded to start healing the rift at their convention.

The Delaware Republican Party? Not so much. This absolutely floored me. The Delaware Republicans had their convention in May.....and held the primary in September. September of '09? No. September, 2010, about FOUR months after their convention produced Castle as the presumptive nominee. Gee, I wonder why some of the O'Donnell supporters might have seen Castle as the nominee of entrenched insiders?

This shouldn't be rocket science. Have a primary where all the prospective nominees can hash out their differences, ask the voters to pick their poison, and then hold a convention so that the winners can say nice things about the losers and everyone can soap up everyone else's backs and get focused on knocking off the Dem in the general election. That way, no matter who wins the primary, there shouldn't be as many charges of "RiNO nepotism" as there were in this primary. There's plenty of time for the State Party to get their ducks in a row for the 2012 election, especially since this is an issue that Purists & Pragmatists both should be able to agree on.

Get your shit together, Delaware. Don't make us send Chris Christie in to knock some heads together.

Now that I know what happened in Delaware, I think I'm leaning more towards this being a NY-23 sort of situation rather than a suicidal Purity Purge.

Do I think O'Donnell is the best candidate for the Delaware electorate? It doesn't matter: Christine O'Donnell is now the GOP nominee for the Biden Hereditary Senate Seat. Good luck & Godspeed.

posted by Russ from Winterset at 10:11 PM

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