It's not often that you will see the same endorsement on Townhall.com as on the Huffington Post, so let's savor this in the newfound era of post-partisanship.
J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Secretary of State of Ohio whose administration of the 2004 election made Katherine Harris look like Mary Tyler Moore, is aggressively pushing to become the next chair of the Republican National Committee when its 168 members convene in 2009 to figure out how to pull their party out of the deep, dank hole they have dug themselves into. And I for one support his selection wholeheartedly.
I have spent a tremendous amount of time studying Ken Blackwell. I made a feature length documentary, FREE FOR ALL!, which examines his corrupt stewardship of Ohio elections. Just a few of Ken's greatest hits:
-Purging a quarter of Cleveland's register voters, one of the most Democratic counties in the country.
-Rewarding no-bid contracts to Diebold for its voting machines, while owning stock in the company, your basic illegal conflict of interest.
-Going to court numerous times to make voting even more difficult.
-And when questioned about such anti-democratic maneuvers, the belicose Blackwell emerges, disrespecting the late, beloved U.S. Rep Stephanie Tubbs Jones.
But I'm not here to focus on Ken Blackwell's tireless war against democracy.
You see, in covering Ken Blackwell during his hapless bid for Ohio governor in 2006, I eventually realized that he requires another documentary to do justice to what a poor politician he is the rest of the time when he is not trying to subvert the electorate. (Coming in 2009!)
Here are some qualities the new RNC Chair should have, and how Ken Blackwell measures up to them.
The RNC Chair should be able to navigate past the party's previous losses and expand the brand appeal.
Since the election, many Republicans have stressed that the divisive platform of extreme conservatism not only drives away the expanding electorate, it limits the party's ability to talk about far more relevant issues. (Like the economy, stupid.)
Cut to Blackwell, stressing himself as a "full-portfolio conservative." His very word choice belies how he has amassed conservative credits like a starving actor on IMDB. His titles from the Family Research Council, the NRA, and more help to bury his opportunistic ascension through Cincinnati politics, starting as an African-American activist in college, on to the city council as a Democrat, to Independent, to fiscal conservative, to far right today.
His greatest conservative achievement is championing the amendment that banned same sex marriage in Ohio, even though two other laws previously existed against gay marriage. Blackwell has closely tied himself to the evangelical right wing base, and ratcheted up the heretic talk like he's the Spanish Inquisition.
The RNC Chair should have the respect of his party's leaders.
On page 347 of his book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward describes W.'s apparent fondness for Blackwell during election night, 2004, as he sat in the White House waiting for the election forecasts to swing his way:
At 2:43 a.m., someone noted that Bush was ahead in the popular vote nationwide, prompting the President to sneer, "If the popular vote made it, I wouldn't be here."
The campaign was left to anxiously wait for a statement from Kenneth Blackwell, a former black power student leader who had morphed into Ohio's gadfly Republican secretary of state."I'm the President of the United States," Bush fumed, "waiting on a secretary of state who is a nut."
And that was when Blackwell was delivering Ohio at all costs. Does Ken still think he's in the club?
The RNC Chair should know how to get votes.
Ken Blackwell lost his bid for governor by 24 points. His unpopularity dragged down the rest of the Republican ticket in 2006, sealing a takeover by the Democrats and ending the GOP's one party rule that had lasted 16 years. There arguably isn't a Democrat who could affect such a swing.
The RNC Chair should know how to wage an effective campaign.
Blackwell's strategy was simple: All negative, all the time. In the Republican primary for governor, Blackwell savaged his fellow cabinet member Jim Petro with ads that linked him with the Tom Noe pay-to-play scandal Coingate that had ruined the Ohio GOP. Lost in these ads were that Blackwell is also in the Ohio GOP, having also received money from the same Tom Noe, now serving 18 years in prison.
Bob Bennett, the Ohio GOP Chairman not normally known for prescience, had this to sayw about Blackwell: "A man who models himself after Ronald Reagan should have a little more respect for winning on ideas and vision. He knows the accusations in these ads are politically motivated, and this kind of gutteral politics doesn't win votes. If we can't win with substantive ideas for leading Ohio, we don't belong in the race."
In the general gubernatorial race against the Democrat, U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, Blackwell lagged in the polls the entire race. His strategy for a turnaround? In the final debate, Blackwell dramatically--however illogically--sought to tie his opponent to NAMBLA. The lowest of the low in scare tactics, it appalled Ohioans, and only cemented Blackwell's defeat.
The RNC Chair should know how to speak.
I am no Peggy Noonan (cough!) but I suspect that in debating an Obama administration, there will be a priority on eloquence.
Blackwell's call to arms in 2006 for civic involvement: "Whether or not we will choose to be thermometers that just take the temperature of our culture, or whether or not we will be thermostats to turn up the heat and define and shape and influence the morays of our culture."
Besides being uninspiring rhetoric (not to mention an incomplete sentence), this oft-repeated meme really just reminded Ohioans how expensive home heating had become. One camera crew I worked with in Ohio had just put in a wood-burning stove to fight their heating bills.
The RNC Chair should have a clue about using New Media to further the party.
Ken Blackwell is proud that he has a Facebook page, and that it even got coverage. What a techie! You'd think with such cutting edge technology such as "spell check," (like on my pirated Microsoft Word 97) he'd be able to spell his own name correctly as he lamely tries to tie Obama to Blago, which even most of the anonymous hotheads at Free Republic could do with more conviction.
Look at this cutting edge video from 2006 to see how he pre-dates Obama's Internet youth army. Just make a mock up of the MTV logo circa 1981, and those whippersnappers will be dying to go door to door for you!
In conclusion, I think that most readers of Huffington Post will join me in supporting Ken Blackwell to lead the Republican Party to a dismal future. Indeed, his penchant for election fraud may be their only chance left.
Follow John Wellington Ennis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnennis
The Repugs have been reduced to living in the past, and I'm all for them staying there.
The national GOP is now reduced to the Southern Bible Thumpers as their base. They probably have the power to get Blackwell the spot. However, social conservatism only plays in Dixie and now the Plains states. Republicans have lost the Northeast, the Pacific Coast, is losing the Mountain West and after Alabama's Shelby became the voice of the GOP, the Great Lakes states are probably going to be Democratic for at least a generation or two.
Palin is the face of the Republican Party and now Blackwell will probably end up running it. The Dems are going to have a long run as the majority in the House and Senate as well as the White House.
Barry Goldwater said it best in 1982:
"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."
True, I had to post a link to it on his Facebook page for him to know about it. But since then, not only has he removed me as a Friend from his Facebook account (that hurts, Ken--what happened to the "Big Tent" philosophy?) he has also taken down the embarrassing videos from his 2006 campaign which I linked to in this article. That it took this long shows his technical knack.
But fear not -- of course I saved copies of these and will be re-posting them soon! Meanwhile, as I write this, he still hasn't gotten around to fixing the page that I linked to where he misspelled his own name in a letter talking down to President-Elect Obama.
My org and the community leaders held a press conference at the Statehouse in Ohio in 2001 after the Senate Finance Hearing was over. We made Blackwell wait until The People talked to the Press and then Blackwell got on the mike and started talking and we all just gathered up our things and walked out. I don't know why he was there or what he droned on about after we left but we went around to Republican Senators offices (those who voted to enact a stall tactic predatory lending 'study committee' instead of stopping people's foreclosures) and we planted little plastic sharks all around and took pictures of their ditzy blond smiling secretaries holding large cardboard "loanshark" checks and published the pictures in our monthly newsletters. They were FURIOUS but they could do nothing about the expose.
Blackwell is a crook. Let the RNC have him. I hope The People show up on his front lawn one day. If I know that community org I used to work for, they will.
That's all conservatives know how to do is to turn up the heat!
Blackwell is only suited to be just one more far-right conservative drone on Fox and little else.
Which Conyers Report did you read? This is from the Executive Summary, at the very beginning of the report:
"With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and
unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities
were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of
State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."
You can download it here:
www.openelections.org/lib/downloads/references/house_judiciary/final_status_report.pdf
Well, that's not the Ken Blackwell that I knew, when I was at old Muskie tech between 1976-1980.
For folks that don't know, Ken Blackwell taught at Xavier University, was a Cincinnati City Councilman and Mayor of Cincinnati.
In fact, I served with him in City Council, as a staff aide to another City Councilman.
I don't know what Excheq is talking about but I wish him well.
to me - ken was basically a running joke on campus, because anyone who had ever met him or spent ten minutes talking to him could see how completely self-centered and phony he was - he took to wearing a dashiki whenever he thought that it would add to his "afro" image, and he was derisively known as "dashiki ken" - he mostly was known for having no true political beliefs or moral philosophy, other than "what's good for ken is good for everyone" - a true politician in the worst sense of the word
Is that Blackwell's word or his transcriber's?
Ken Blackwell has a difficult time making a cogent sentence. Putting his utter incompetency aside for the moment, he is the worst politician I've ever witnessed. He is an opportunist to the Nth degree. Most Ohio Republicans were embarassed by his gubernatorial race. What many don't know about are the number of enemies he made of members of his own Party before and after the election. He got absolutely shellacked by Democrat Ted Strickland - and had it not been for such a neanderthal Republican base in Ohio that won't anything but Republican - he should have lost by a wider margin than 24 points.
Given all that he is - and especially for all those qualities he does not possess - Ken Blackwell would be PERFECT for RNC Chair.