More news showing how tough it can be.

Today’s Post-Tribune details a Lake County GOP official’s lament that the county’s Republicans are self-destructing.

A top official with the Lake County Republican Party claims the party is self-destructing because of infighting.

Peter Thayer, board secretary of the county GOP, blames Chairman John Curley for failing to unify the party.

“The fighting strengthens bitterness, promotes factionalism and weakens the party structure,” said Thayer, of East Chicago, who plans to run for the county chairmanship in March.

He points to last week’s departure of longtime Center Township Assessor Martha Wheeler as an example of internal riffs that have occurred during Curley’s tenure.

It seems that the same thing has happened in Illinois where the GOP has seemingly collapsed as well.

It’s too bad because our political system works best when there are opposition parties to act as a check against unrestrained single-party rule.

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Technorati Tags: GOP, Lake County, Northwest Indiana, Republican Party

Will Chicago’s politicial culture become a major issue in the fall, maybe brought to the public’s attention via some shadowy 527 group’s ads?

Is that why John McCain brought up the need to fight against political corruption at a California fund raiser?  Is that why Sarah Palin with her reputation of fighting against political corruption was brought onto the GOP ticket?

Could Chicago’s culture and history of political corruption have been the reason why Hillary Clinton didn’t want to give up without fighting for every last delegate?  Hillary Clinton brought up the Tony Rezko – Obama connections earlier this year in her primary battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

TMLutas wrote earlier this year that maybe the connections between Rezko and Obama aren’t so obvious for a reason.

Could it have just been a coincidence, maybe a bet on someone who had shown political promise in Chicago during a few years from June 1985 until entering law school in 1988 and greatness in law school?

It might have been all of the news about Barack Obama being the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review that captured the attention of many in Chicago and elsewhere.  Is that how Tony Rezko came to offer Barack Obama a job — unsolicitied — when Barack Obama was still in law school?

Did those contacts over the years with Tony Rezko influence Barack Obama in any way?

Writes TMLutas:

Rezko isn’t an isolated player but rather part of a corrupt machine. “Public Official A”, Rezko’s major political patron, has now been officially revealed to be Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Smart corrupt officials don’t always do simple cash for favor deals, not in a place like Chicago which is crawling with corruption, not if they want to go national and want to be able to pretend to be honest. Smart corrupt officials use middle men.

Can someone rise through the ranks of Chicago’s political world without being caught up in corruption?

Could Barack Obama have been kept away from the messier side of Chicago’s machine on the hopes that he’d rise to a level where he’d be able to help the Chicago political machine via legitimate ways?  Is Barack Obama one of the last clean politicians in a land where there are multiple political corruption investigations being conducted right now?

Until there’s something more, we have to give Barack Obama every benefit of the doubt that he stayed away from all of those interesting characters floating around the political scene in Chicago.  After all, Chicago is the place where Alderman Arenda Troutman was caught on a FBI wire saying “most aldermen, most politicians are hoes.”

Having lived in Northwest Indiana for a while — home of one of the most corrupt political machines in the country, according to Robert Kennedy and the place where every so often the FBI carts away government documents from some politicial figure’s office — always makes me wonder.  Can someone swim in a sea of political corruption without getting dirty?

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Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, GOP, John McCain, political corruption, Republican Party

What do you think? Personally, I’m glad the post didn’t mention Bush and that guy with the funny mustache — that has gotten old.

Let the Molotov cocktails fly, comrades!

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Technorati Tags: GOP, Kevin Tracy, Republican Party

Grand New Party authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam say Republicans need to start reaching out to workers who share the party’s conservative values and desires for individual liberties — a group that they call Sam’s Club Voters.

This new outreach will mean mixing economic issues affecting workers with cultural issues in order to win back voters who vote with their pocketbooks, but may be disaffected by the liberal elites in charge of the modern Democratic party, the authors say.

Excerpt from Grand New Party:

The interests of the working class — the common man, the hardworking but unexceptional citizen — have been at the heart of every great American political movement. From Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan, our most successful leaders have sought the democratization of wealth, competence, and social standing — not so that every American might be rich or famous, but so that we might all be independent and self-reliant and secure. In this sense, the American dream is ultimately a dream of home, of a place to call your own, earned and not inherited, and free from the petty tyrannies of landlords, bureaucrats, and bankers. It’s a dream of a country in which ownership is available to everyone, provided that they are willing to work for it, rather than being handed out on the basis of wealth or caste, brains or beauty.

Refocusing some of the GOP’s outreach will be the key to GOP victory for years to come.

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Technorati Tags: GOP, Grand New Party, Reihan Salam, Republican Party, Ross Douthat