The Wall Street Journal reported last week about a fundraising letter by the Texas GOP state chairman, Steve Munisteri.
Although you might not have heard of him, as an activist for conservative grassroots movements, Munisteri has been around forever. According to his bio:
As State Chairman of the Texas chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, Munisteri begun the practice of issuing legislative rankings for members of the Texas House of Representatives and State Senate. In 1980, Munisteri founded Young Conservatives of Texas, a group which continues to produce the future generations of our conservative leaders and elected officials in college campuses across the State.Most recently he was elected to chair the Republican Party of Texas in 2010. For a conservative in Texas, the future looks rather grim.
Texas is slowly but surely turning from a conservative red to a decidedly liberal blue. Apparently, as Texas slips from the Republican fingers, Munisteri is ready to pull out all stops; hence the letter.
That letter, aimed at poaching the last dollar from the Texas rich, was full of the predictable fear-mongering about Democrats “ coming to take away your guns,” and more than that, “they’re coming to hijack your rights and freedoms.”
He called the new Democratic voter-mobilization effort, Battleground Texas, “a clear and present threat to you and your family.”
It’s the kind of rhetoric that doesn’t hold up to too much analysis or critical thinking but, to a certain type of Texas Republican, it really tends to stir the blood. To outsiders, it just smells like the sour BO of desperation. (At least the Texas Democrats behind Battleground thought so.)
However, there was another detail in the article about the letter that caught my eye.
However, there was another detail in the article about the letter that caught my eye.
To fight back, the GOP letter urges Republicans to give anywhere from $15 to $5,000 so the party can “immediately undertake our own effort to identify thousands of Texas conservatives.”
The letter warns that the former Obama operatives “have become masters of the slimy ‘dark arts’ of campaigning: creating massive databases; collecting information on every voter and non-voter; and then using that information to do whatever it takes to drive these voters away from Republican candidates and principles.”
That’s a rather interesting claim for Munisteri to make against the Democratic Party. While there is nothing illegal about collecting information in “massive databases,” Munisteri is playing on the ignorance of his constituents about modern political campaigning. As Mr. Munisteri well knows, these so-called dark and slimy arts have become a long feature of the Republican campaigns since the Bush administration.
