GOP Fundamentals

The Republican National Committee winter meeting is underway in DC. Later today, the 168 voting members of the RNC will elect the next chairman.

On my way to the luncheon, I ran into one of the candidates for GOP chairman, Ken Blackwell. I’ve known Ken since...well for a long time. We exchanged pleasantries. I asked how things were going. Ken said, “I’m alive, well and still here.”

John Fund, author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, was the luncheon speaker. You know, it’s hard to take Fund seriously when he talks about integrity. This is, after all, the same person who was arrested and charged with assaulting a former girlfriend. He met his former girlfriend when he was dating her mother.

But that was then. Yesterday, Fund was introduced as a “model of investigative public interest journalism. John Fund is who Bill Moyers thinks he is.”

Fund did his bit about how voter fraud and ACORN, which he described as a “criminal enterprise.”

Fund spent most of his time trying to buck up a vanquished party. He advised Republicans to embrace John Dryden’s call to arms:

I’m a little wounded, but I am not slain;
I will lay me down for to bleed a while,

Then I’ll rise and fight with you again.

Echoing Rush Limbaugh, he predicted President Obama’s economic stimulus package will fail:

The stimulus plan can’t create real jobs in the private economy… Liberal policies will fail.

Fund continued:

Congress and his party will not let Obama govern from the center.

The failure of Obama’s recovery plan “will give voters another chance to hear from us”:

Don’t abandon your principles. You will get another chance. Memories will fade. The name brand will be restored.

In the meantime, Fund said Republicans should “smile and be brave. Stick to your principles. There will always be another election.”