The Story Behind The Clothes-in-garbage-bags-story
This morning, FrumForum.com broke news that the Republican National Committee has been stashing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s campaign wardrobe in garbage bags. Our story has been widely picked up on the Web and has generated much controversy. Some further things need to be said:
This story is not a story about Gov. Palin. In this matter, the former vice-presidential nominee did exactly the right thing. She promised to return the wardrobe at the end of the campaign, and she did return the wardrobe.
The story is about a dysfunctional party apparatus. Because of their own inability to act, the RNC has left Gov. Palin looking like a promise-breaker – and left everyone who donated to the McCain-Palin campaign feeling like a fool.
The rage in the donor community about the wardrobe is real and intense. Our party was gasping for funds in 2008. We could not afford to waste a dime. More to the point: not every Republican donor is rich. Many are people to whom the $200 or $500 or $1000 they give represents a real sacrifice. They need to know that their sacrifice has not been used frivolously. The RNC’s protracted delay in donating the clothes as promised raises a troubling question: Will our party be embarrassed by what those bags contain?
Our party has been crippled by an all-pervading assumption at the center that if you just don’t talk about bad news, it will go away: whether it’s an extravagant wardrobe decision - or a bad job creation record. Our leaders cocoon themselves, refuse to hear unwelcome news, and reward yesmanship.
We have seen this attitude again in the reaction in some quarters to our story. If only Frum Forum had refrained from mentioning the obvious – that Palin’s promise had been left hanging in midair – why then nobody else would mention it either. And if nobody mentioned it, then it would disappear. Right? Not right. As soon as Gov. Palin returned to the national scene, so too would all the unanswered questions left over from the last campaign.
There is obviously something seriously wrong with the decision making at the Republican center. It is this leadership dysfunction that should be the central issue in the race for the chairmanship of the RNC. Tragically however it is generally assumed that the frontrunner in the race is the current incumbent: a man who apparently thinks that stuffing unwanted things in trash bags makes them magically disappear. Meanwhile, the man who offers a charismatic, telegenic face for our party – Michael Steele – is disregarded because he has accumulated some ideological speeding tickets as he fought and nearly won a tight senatorial race in one of the nation’s bluest states.
Gov. Palin remains a controversial figure in the Republican party. But the moral of this particular story is not a moral that bears on her. The moral bears on the RNC, an organization whose leaders think that evasion is a solution. It’s time for new leadership at the RNC and at all the highest levels of our party organization.