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Cornyn riding herd as Senate races expose GOP rift
12:00 AM CST on Saturday, November 28, 2009
WASHINGTON – This has been a year of soul-searching for Republicans, and with the party eager to rebuild, its Senate campaign chief finds himself in a pinch.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn sees opportunities in numerous states Barack Obama won last year and – despite his own unabashed conservatism – he's been pushing moderate candidates. It's a fairly standard tactic, but it has not sat well with many conservative activists.
Emboldened by a summer of Tea Party protests and anger-infused town halls, they're demanding purity, as they did in an upstate New York congressional race this month that exposed raw nerves and bitter fault lines in the GOP. Now, in Senate races from California to Florida, conservative activists are trying to defeat candidates backed by the Republican establishment.
"We have a serious schism within the party," said John Weaver, a GOP political consultant and Texan who has advised Sen. John McCain. "The voters within the party have to ultimately decide: Do we want to be a purist party that sits in the corner and loses on every issue?"
The way forward – purity or pragmatism, angry populism or a tapestry of ideologies welcome under a single tent – may not find consensus until a national leader emerges, perhaps in the 2012 presidential contest. As chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Cornyn just wants to fill more Senate seats with Republicans.
"It's healthy, all this energy," he said. "It's a little boisterous, which democracy can be."
In the 100-seat Senate, the magic number is 60. That's how many votes it takes to force legislation past a filibuster, as Democrats did last weekend on health care, on a 60-39 party-line vote.
Cornyn's initial goal is simply to crack that supermajority. Political oddsmakers say the prospects are pretty good for Republicans to do much better, picking up at least three or four seats next year. With double-digit unemployment, the president's waning popularity and public restiveness with one-party rule, it could be many more.
But first, Cornyn must get his party moving mostly in the same direction. And nowhere is the difficulty of that more evident than in Florida.
Nearly a year ago, Cornyn flew to the Sunshine State to persuade former Gov. Jeb Bush to run for the Senate. When that mission failed, he recruited and then endorsed Gov. Charlie Crist.
From Cornyn's perch, the endorsement – a rare step for a Republican Senate campaign chief in a primary, but not unheard of – was almost a no-brainer. Crist was popular and could raise all the money needed without help.
"When I'm looking at a national map, and with my mandate to elect as many Republican senators as possible ... there wasn't really any choice," Cornyn said.
But Crist had embraced the Obama stimulus plan wholeheartedly and even shared an unforgivable hug with the president whose conservative detractors view him as a European-style socialist. And those conservative detractors had an ideologically pure candidate they preferred: former state House Speaker Marco Rubio.
Critics say Cornyn misread the landscape in his eagerness to place a safe bet.
Chris Chicola, president of the Club for Growth, which focuses on limited government and conservative economic policy, and which has backed Rubio, called the race one of several "instances where the NRSC has gotten ahead of the voters."
That changed a few weeks ago, after the New York congressional race and after Republicans rode waves of unrest to governorships in Virginia and New Jersey. Facing an energized right, Cornyn promised not to funnel any money to Crist, though he said he hadn't planned to anyway.
"It's not a contest with Cornyn," Chicola said, but "Cornyn's statements in the aftermath were a bit of a victory in themselves."
He considers a bit of introspection healthy for a party that has lost 15 Senate seats in the seven years since Cornyn became a senator.
"They probably shouldn't keep doing the same things they've been doing," he said.
Cornyn has also crossed swords with Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., a freshman who has wielded his political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, against Crist and other establishment darlings, including Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive who faces a conservative insurgent, state lawmaker Chuck DeVore, in California.
DeMint isn't much of a fan of the moderates-in-moderate-states approach, though he doesn't begrudge Cornyn's pursuit of it.
"We are debating who we are," he said. "There's a big tent out there, but it's around some of these core principal ideas. Cornyn understands that as well as anyone."
He added: "He's doing what he has to do. He's doing a good job."
Civil war and soul-searching are hardly confined to Republicans. The liberal group MoveOn.org has threatened to defeat any Democratic senator who opposes the health care bill, and it has $3.5 million bankrolled to back up the threat.
And Republicans aren't tearing each other up everywhere. The pragmatist and ideological purity camps have common cause in Pennsylvania, for instance, where Republicans are universally eager to oust Sen. Arlen Specter, who left the GOP this year.
But the divide remains. In February, Cornyn was booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference when he argued that the way to rebuild the party was to seek out candidates who fit their electorates. In a moment of prescience, he warned against a "circular firing squad."
"I call it basic arithmetic," he said in recent interview. "We have to build our numbers. I'm delighted we have good candidates in places where we haven't elected Republicans for a while."
And the trend still favors Republicans. This time a year ago, Cornyn noted with some satisfaction, "some people said the Republican Party is dead as a national party. We're demonstrating that's not true."
Not all party insiders buy the idea that there's any serious schism.
In Dallas, Republican consultant Scott Howell – whose current clients include Senate candidates in Kansas and Connecticut – views that as a storyline Democrats peddle to distract from their impending losses in the 2010 midterm elections and from the public's dissatisfaction with their flawed policies.
He acknowledges the challenge in harnessing the Tea Party energy but said because Republicans are on the offense in many states suggests "we're in a pretty good spot. ... If the energy level keeps up, we could have some luck."
Ed Gillespie, a former Republican national chairman, sees parallels with 1992, when Dallas billionaire Ross Perot attracted legions of disenchanted voters – most of whom ended up in the Republican tent, eventually. Folks waving anti-Obama signs at Tea Party rallies have even more common cause with Republicans.
"I see a lot of wind at Republicans' backs. There is a lot of intensity," Gillespie said. "If you're someone who's concerned about higher taxes, growing spending, and you're looking at a choice between [a moderate Republican] ... and a liberal Democrat, you pretty much have a sense of where your vote is going to go."
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