The perversely named Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado GOP, has dropped out of his race for re-election.
"I have tired of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is while saying 'uniting conservatives' is all that is needed to win competitive races across the state," Wadhams wrote in a memo to the Colorado Republican State Central Committee obtained by The Denver Post.
More below the fold.
Now, some might think that Wadhams should be replaced after his fail became epochal during the 2010 elections.
- The GOP candidate for governor, Dan Maes, obtained 11.3% of the vote. His 199,034 votes received in the general were almost identical to the 197,629 votes Maes received in the GOP primary.
- The GOP candidate for Senate, Ken Buck, was one of the Tea Brained Republican failures of 2010, allowing a vulnerable Michael Bennet to return to the Senate.
- Wadhams got into a shouting match with Tom Tancredo, who at the time had just announced his 3rd party candidacy for governor - on live radio.
So, Dick Wadhams has not exactly covered himself in glory. This is the man who Slate, in 2005, identified as the next Karl Rove. I guess that, like Karl, Dick has the maths. Or maybe Wadhams was less successful because Colorado has a paper trail for our ballots.
A last word from his memo.
I have no delusions this (Editor's note: seeing conspiracies etc.) will recede after the state central committee meeting in March. Meanwhile, the ability of Colorado Republicans to win and retain the votes of hundreds of thousands of unaffiliated swing voters in 2012 will be severely undermined.
The Tea Party continues to insist on purity above all else. And now we see that not only do they nominate wondrously flawed candidates (Miller, Angle, Buck, O'Donnell) but they also drive away the skilled (well, maybe not so very skilled in Wadham's case) professionals a party needs to run successful campaigns.
The upshot? The chances for Democrats of holding Mark Udall's seat, retaking a lost Congressional seat or two, and regaining the Colorado State Senate are probably being improved even as we speak by Republican infighting. Not that Wadhams is the best possible state GOP chair; but that his replacement will very likely be focused on sending a pure conservative message and "uniting conservatives". In other words, someone who thinks the problem with Ken Buck was that he wasn't conservative enough....
Good luck with that strategy, Goposaurs. This is not your father's Colorado. This state is purple and heading blue.