Campaigner tapped to be state GOP leader
DENVER - A year ago, Dick Wadhams never thought he’d be back in Colorado full time trying to resurrect the state Republican Party.
Wadhams, the silver-tongued Las Animas native who has led upset campaigns across the country, expected to be getting Virginia Sen. George Allen prepped for his presidential run. That was before Allen made his infamous “macaca” remark amid what should have been an easy reelection bid, and suddenly both he and Wadhams, his press secretary, found themselves out of their jobs.
One week after that debacle, Wadhams fielded a call from Colorado Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany, who suggested that the 51-year-old return to the state and run for GOP chairman. Wadhams laughed, but the more he mulled the suggestion, the more it seemed fitting.
The Republican Party, after all, wasn’t supposed to be in this place, either. It’s not used to being clobbered the way it was in 2004 and 2006.
In 2002, voters re-elected Sen. Wayne Allard and Gov. Bill Owens. Republicans held both chambers of the General Assembly and five of the state’s seven congressional seats.
Two election cycles later, the GOP has lost a Senate seat, the governor’s mansion, both legislative houses and two congressional seats. With Allard retiring in 2008, it will have to scrap to hold his seat as well.
Wadhams returns to a depleted party. Warming to the party chairman’s role as cheerleader, Wadhams says the GOP is ready to bounce back.
He was elected state party chairman Saturday, but he also will take over the duties of executive director, chief recruiter and, essentially, savior of the GOP.
“What I want to do is wake up every morning and do nothing but eat, sleep and drink this stuff,” Wadhams said last week. “Given the last two cycles and what happened, there’s an attitude that we have to try something different.”
Party chairmen and chairwomen typically don’t come in as the most visible members of their organization, but Wadhams enters the stage at a different time.
After a series of bitter primary battles in 2004 and 2006 and a split over the Referendum C revenue-retention question in 2005, the GOP is “a divided party . . . a party that needs work and needs leadership,” Colorado State University political science professor John Straayer said. State Democrats are expected to re-elect all of their officers this weekend.
McElhany, R-Colorado Springs, said he went after Wadhams because he saw him as someone who could unify the party with his “unquestioned credibility.” But Wadhams’ history is that of unifying voters temporarily around a candidate, not rebuilding a fractured family.
He gained his reputation as a master campaigner by guiding Allard to two victories, then moved onto the national scene while managing John Thune’s huge upset of then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota in 2004. He went to work for Allen next, hoping to prepare for a presidential campaign but watched those dreams evaporate when Allen mocked the Indian heritage of one of his opponent’s workers on camera.
In the past, businessmen have served as party chairmen, overseeing the GOP while hiring a staff to run the day-to-day activities. By taking over as the head staffer, Wadhams will run the candidate recruitment and training, the party research and the compilation of voter lists he views as invaluable to success.
He hopes to hold together various elements of the party. Debates and primaries are inevitable, Wadhams said, but they need not be divisive. He has not set any specific goals on offices Republicans can recapture, saying, instead, that he will start by holding seats now in GOP hands and work up.
Wadhams also will try to use his office more as a bully pulpit to question the activities of elected Democrats, especially those in the Legislature, he said. For months, he has been working with GOP legislative leaders to develop alternatives to Democratic proposals.
Wadhams’ greatest strength, political observers say, is his ability to characterize opponents in his terms rather than theirs, such as the “17th Street lawyer-lobbyist” tin can he tied to the tail of Tom Strickland, Allard’s two-time Democratic opponent.
“He’s a craftsman in dealing with the media, and he knows how to structure a message in a way that people understand,” Allard said.
That style has left him with a number of detractors as well. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had pages of talking points against Wadhams in 2004, and Michael Huttner of the liberal group ProgressNow.org said Wadhams’ attempts to blow over Allen’s comments last year show he is out of touch.
“This is a guy who has a reputation for misleading the press, for misleading the public,” Huttner said.
Huttner also urged Wadhams to rein in what he called the extremist elements of the Republican Party who question the veracity of sexual-assault claims or equate abortion to slavery, a challenge Wadhams had not heard until last week.
In a telling response, Wadhams turned that comment around and said he hopes to exploit what he called Democratic extremism, citing legislative leaders who have asked Mexico for help on immigration issues or referred to Iraqi insurgents as freedom fighters.
“It’s a target-rich environment for what the Dems are going to give us,” he said without pause. “I would agree with ProgressNow — they’re going to have to rein in their own liberal extremists in their own party.”
It’s going to be that kind of twoyear term with Wadhams in charge: No matter how much or little he accomplishes, it won’t be quietly.
CONTACT THE WRITER: (303) 837-0613 or ed.sealover@gazette.com.
