My, my. Apparently, the Log Cabin Republicans may be growing a collective brain. (No, no, not in the horror movie kind of way.) Whoda thunk? And all it took was for the administration to make official what everyone else knew all along.
We're being treated this weekend to a revealing, if slightly predictable, display of President Bush's political priorities.
Meetings of the National Rifle Association in Pittsburgh and Log Cabin Republicans in Palm Springs, California, will show where Bush is building his alliances this year. And where he is not. [...] out on the Left Coast, a different sort of Republican gathering is taking place. So which Bush administration official did the Log Cabin Republicans invite as their keynote speaker? "No one," one senior Log Cabin official told the Grind. "We didn't think that [invitation] would be a wise use of paper." (They did, however, invite Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, who has agreed to do the keynote address.)
The gay GOP group has opposed Bush's support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages.
Christopher Barron, the group's political director, said it's too early to say whether the Log Cabin Republicans will endorse Bush. Members won't go there until the Republican National Convention in August. They do meet Saturday afternoon to talk about endorsements, but Barron said no headline would emerge from that gathering. "Obviously there's a split. Members are in different places on this," he said. "But it's hard to say at this point what people are thinking."
Barron has to say that. He's doing his job. But I'll make a vow: If Log Cabin Republicans endorse Bush, I'll eat my shoe. (Then again, remember how that threat turned out for CNN's Tucker Carlson when he pooh-poohed sales of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir, "Living History.")
The Grind doesn't usually make predictions in politics, but when a group takes the unprecedented step of running ads against a sitting president of its own party, one has to assume there's trouble in the kitchen.
Well, one would hope that there was "trouble in the kitchen", so to speak. When one has been sacrificed on the altar of political incorrectitude, one should perhaps be a tad perturbed about the whole thing.
To be sure, even if the LCR doesn't endorse Bush, it's not likely to endorse Kerry. After all, his position differs from Bush's only to a certain extent. Besides, while they may be forgiven by the party machinery for declining to take a position in the year in which they have been offered up to the conservative gods -- it would be really unreasonable to expect them to endorse Bush right now, wouldn't it? -- they wouldn't be excused for actually supporting the enemy.
Posted by iain at April 19, 2004 12:57 AM
