From The Hotline Latest Edition for Tuesday, April 29,2008

NEVADA (1/19 CAUCUSES)

Rage Against The Machine

Tue. Apr. 29, 2008


NV GOP exec. dir. Zac Moyle said 4/28 "that the resumption of the weekend's incomplete state convention will probably be in Reno." Party rules require the convo to conclude in Reno and a new plan may be announced by the end of the week.

"Angry recriminations continued to fly. Many delegate suspected the party establishment shut down the convention not because time ran out for the newly lengthy delegate election process, as party leaders claimed, but because they feared a takeover" by Ron Paul forces.

Convo chair/state Sen. Bob Beers (R): "People were expecting us to secretly reconvene at 3 in the morning on Sunday, and that is simply ludicrous. You have a committed group of volunteer Republican Party members who are trying to create the best mechanism to express the will of the Nevada Republicans. Nothing underhanded of duplicitous is going to occur."

Univ. NV prof. Eric Herzik: "The Ron Paul people are fanatical in their attachment for Ron Paul and their belief that the Republican Party has gone astray. There was no effort by the mainstream Republican Party to get delegates there, so they were ambushed by something they should have seen coming" (Ball, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 4/29).

Las Vegas Review-Journal's Neff writes, Paul supporters "believe both parties to be corrupt and their officials to be stool pigeons. That's a strange place for" Beers. "A former libertarian whose achieved rock star status among fiscal conservatives is now just The Man." Beers "had the dubious distinction of being the one to tell the unhappy hordes he was shutting down" the convo 4/26. The convo "took some of the sheen off Beers in a place he's rarely been muddied."

Back when GOPers were mocking Dems for their failed Clark Co. convo, "the conventional wisdom was that Democrats were too disorganized to mount a successful challenge in a red state." When Dems screwed up, "it was the count party that was to blame, not the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The seizing of the GOP convention is really the McCain campaign's fault.

GOPers proved they were just as unorganized as the Dems. "All things being equal," the GOPers "typically find a way to figure it out. But things aren't equal anymore. Even without a nominee," Dems have 56K more voters statewide. "Color Ron's movement purple. It may just be helping Nevada move that way" (4/29).