Don Roach: I Am a Republican…We’re Idiots
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
No, this is not going to be an article about how I have come to see that the way of the Democrat is the road I should begin to travel. Apologies to family, friends, and countless others who have looked at me cross-eyed for my Republican allegiance throughout the years; but today is a day when I call a spade a spade. So here goes.
We, the Rhode Island Republicans, are idiots.
You might be saying to yourself, “well gee, Don, I could have told you that a decade or two or ten ago” and today, I’m not going to argue with you. What has inspired my new revelation? Last Thursday, the RI GOP held elections for the position of party chairman. I spoke about the two candidates last week and every city/town chairman, central committeeman/woman, and/or candidate for lower office fired off email after email to voters trying to convince the masses why Mark Smiley or Dr. Dan Harrop was the right person to lead the party.
Unfortunately, the night of the vote I had a prior engagement and could not attend or vote in the election. My vote would have gone to Harrop as I just didn’t feel that Smiley had the political chops to push us forward. I thought many of Smiley’s ideas were ahead of the curve and innovative, but politics is about being able to wade in and out of tricky environments and that is not something I believe Smiley is ready to handle. Whatever, it’s just my opinion and if he was going to win the chairmanship I would certainly support him and help in any way I could – like a good RI GOP soldier. As I surveyed some of my friends most believed that Harrop would win comfortably and so I didn’t feel too bad for being unable to attend the meeting.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST94-93 and 187 voters…or was it 186?
And then we had 94-93. Smiley received 94 votes for chair with Harrop receiving 93. If that was the end of the story, I’d just be writing to you today saying “I’m a Republican…and I’M and idiot” having been unable to cast a vote that would have tied the election. I wish it were that easy.
Instead, there were 186 validated voters but there were 187 votes. Many of us get on some of our Board of Canvassers when they make mistakes with an electorate of thousands, but here we have the RI GOP unable to track 186 or 187 voters. Because they were unable to validate all of the voters and the voter count didn’t tie to the actual number of voters, RI GOP leadership decided to null the vote and reschedule another vote.
My eyes rolled when I read about this fiasco but hey, these things happen. We all make mistakes and with a vote this close, you want to make sure you get it right. So another vote was scheduled. But we’re the RI GOP and it’s never that simple….
Smiley declared winner…Say What?!?
In an e-mail to the State Central Committee, outgoing chair Mark Zaccaria, told the rest of the members of the RI GOP this:
“After careful investigation of the check-in documents used in last Thursday's vote for the state party Chair, and after interviews with all concerned and signed statements attesting to the events that occur[r]ed, the missing voter in that election has been identified and the authorized vote count of 187 total voters and 187 total ballots cast has been certified.”
Huh?
Wait a minute, when RI GOPers left the meeting on Thursday their understanding was that the vote had been nullified and that a revote was needed. In the note from Zaccaria, the original vote was reinstated, Smiley declared the winner, and the revote was not going to happen. This was met with a number of emails decrying the decision.
The problem as I see it is not with declaring Smiley the winner after validating the “check-in documents”, but everyone left the Thursday meeting believing the vote was nullified and that a revote would occur. That the leadership of the RI GOP reversed course demonstrates, in my opinion, the idiocy of the RI GOP.
As I said before, we all make mistakes and no one is perfect. But how we handle and respond to mistakes determines, again in my opinion, how seriously we should expect the voters of Rhode Island to take our party. Leadership should have either told everyone Thursday that they would take a few days to validate the check-in documents to determine if an extra vote was cast. If an extra vote was cast then a revote would occur but if not and the final vote was validated, Smiley would be declared the winner. From all accounts that I have seen, this didn’t happen. On the contrary, the vote was invalidated and the folks were told that a revote would happen.
A few days later…Smiley is the new chair.
Why do I call us idiots?
The simple answer is that we, as a party, do not seem to have the ability to make rational and reasonable decisions that don’t make us look like idiots. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about – selling out the soul of the party in 2006 to support a Republican in name only, Lincoln Chafee, not really supporting General Assembly candidates in 2006 and instead asking them to stump for the aforementioned Chafee, supporting whatever the awful 2010 General Assembly campaign was called, and on and on.
To Chairman Smiley – you’ve been on the job less than a few days and you have an opportunity to reverse this course. You’ve talked about focusing on General Assembly candidates, which is great, but I hope you leverage the popular support of two of our more prominent members in support of those efforts. The RI GOP doesn’t really have a brand, unless you consider infighting and squabbling over the table scraps Democrats leave a brand.
I apologize but I don’t have much faith and the lack of faith isn’t directed at you but at all of us…idiots doomed to toil for a party that the state doesn’t connect with voters (looking at you 18% in Providence Brendan Doherty), doomed to languish as a second-class party with a handful (and that’s almost literal) of members in the General Assembly, and doomed to read about how silly we act year after year
Mr. Smiley, you’ve got a large job ahead of you, one littered with the mistakes of your predecessors, and I’m hoping and praying you do something different. Anything has to be better than this, right?
Don Roach is a pessimistic idiot Republican. You can reach him at [email protected].
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