Credit to The Denver Post, Talking Points Memo, and SquareState who have all done a superb job on this story.
For those that missed it, Bob Schaffer, the Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado, in a recent interview, held up the Marianas Islands as an example of how we should handle our immigration system. Not only is it a horrible system but it turns out Schaffer got Abramoff money to provide this support.
Colorado is a purple state, has been for a long time. It's been very common for Colorado to have it's Senate seats split, one Republican and one Democratic. As with most purple states, in 2006 it had numerous Democratic wins including Governor and control (barely) of the state House & Senate.
The Republican party is a shambles here, much of it self-inflicted. A large chunk of it is convinced that they lost because they were not conservative enough. James Dobson, Focus on the Family is centered in Colorado Springs as are a number of other evangelical operations and several military bases. That provides the wingnuts a strong base of operation.
There are reasonable Republicans in this state, some moderate and some who are quite conservative but do still live in reality. Because of the tax limitations in our state constitution placed there by the Club For Growth (the measure is called TABOR here), the state was headed for financial disaster. Numerous Republicans, including the then Governor, Republican Bill Owens, all backed a referendum that gave us about 10 years of breathing space. I bring all this up to show there is presently a battle for the soul of the Republican party here and both sides are strong.
But for the '08 election the state Republican party has publicly stated that they have very limited resources (like nationally we Dems have money, the Repubs do not) that they are putting everything into the U.S. Senate race. As all major state races (Governor, etc) are in 2 years, this makes some sense.
So they settled on Bob Schaffer, a very conservative ex-house member. He looks good and is very personable, but his politics are a bit to the right of Atilla the Hun. And his campaign manager is Dick "Macaca" Wadhams who ran Allen's campaign where he lost to Webb.
So on to what's happening. For full details of the story, click on the links above, I'm not going to repeat them here. What I want to cover is why this is the end for Schaffer.
First, the story is a perfect storm. Schaffer instigated it on his own, by praising a system that includes sex slavery, forced abortions, and 3rd world explotation of factory workers. Ok, so he praised a terrible system but politicians do make mistakes.
But then we find that he took an "investigative" trip to the CNMI. This means he cannot plead ignorance of the system when he praised it. He has to speak to why he finds such a horrendous system praiseworthy.
And the trip? Paid for by Jack Abramoff. Who in turn was raking in millions from the sweatshop owners and the CNMI government itself. This is about as direct a quid-pro-quo as you will ever find in politics. Most voters can and will be able to follow the dots on this.
How bad is it? The Denver Post is one of the two main papers in Colorado. It is so pro-Republican that it ran a front page editorial tearing into the Democratic Governor about a month ago. It's a quality paper but editorially it does have a clear bias (think Wall Street Journal, not Fox News). And yet the Schaffer campaign (through their "independent" blog) are now saying:
It's time for the Big Blue Lie Machine and its surrogate the Denver Post to put away the Abramoff card, and start dealing with the facts.
That's right, having no defense on the facts, they are trying to trash a major paper that was a slam dunk endorsement for them. And that's their full defense. That there is no story here.
How big an impact will this have? The Denver Post is doing a superb job digging in and every day there are more details that make it worse. It is all over the blogosphere and aside from the one Schaffer sockpuppet blog, silence on the right and lots of details (and glee) on the left.
The Rocky Mountain News (the other major Colorado paper) is reporting more the he said/she said without listing out the clear facts with the comments. But even that is damaging and I expect that reporting to improve as they don't want to stay eating the Post's dust.
The one good TV spot so far is this beauty from KREX in Grand Junction where Schaffer was at a fundraiser with Dick Cheney:
No additional TV yet, probably due to the fact that Bob Schaffer and Dick Wadhams are apparently now in the witness protection program and cannot be located. But again, this should pick up as more and more of the details emerge.
And the national press is starting to take notice. It may not be gigantic but it will get some attention.
The end result of this is that Schaffer is toast. Colorado is a very competitive state, it's a Democratic year, and this story has traction here locally. This will be hanging around Schaffer's neck until election day.
In addition, his largest base here is evangelicals and it's hard to get them charged up for a candidate that supports a system with forced abortions, church access denied, and sex slavery. Any one is a deal killer. All three...
Yes between now and election day almost anything can happen. But the odds of anything that changes the race substantially - close to 0. In fact, the biggest danger is Schaffer drops out before the state Republican convention and they replace him with someone who is not damaged (paging Alan Keyes).
But for now, if Jack Ryan had to drop out against Barack Obama because of wife swapping, how on earth does Schaffer have a prayer?
The best blog for ongoing discussion of this is at ColoradoPols