The ugliness of College Republicans, part 2

Benjamin Wallace-Wells has written a devastating profile of Patrick McHenry, a young Republican Congressman who is the prototypical foot soldier of the Rove-DeLay-Norquist machine. It's all worth reading, but this paragraph below is yet another window into the ugly training in smear politics that College Republicans gives future party elites:

The College Republicans have legendarily been the starting point, the training and networking ground, for the careers of all of the party's most influential activists: Lee Atwater, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove. And producing Roves and Atwaters, tactical geniuses and election-winners, is exactly what the organization is set up to do: The organization is a four-year crash course in how to win votes from conservatives, in electioneering, with its members running endlessly for College Republican state board, College Republican state treasurer, College Republican national committee. There's a balls-out element to these contests, to the infighting; when I talked to College Republicans in North Carolina, I heard constant, ridiculous allegations thrown at rivals within the organizations. This rival had an illegitimate son in Tennessee, that one paid for an abortion for some poor girl from Missouri. When I asked an innocent question about a network of political consultants in Raleigh, one College Republican stopped me immediately: "Surely you must have heard," he said ominously, his drawl thick, "about them bisexual orgies."

Later, the smears continued during the recent leadership fight within the organization:

At the convention, things got competitive, then grotesque. Convention speakers were deleted out of the program at the last minute, replaced by figures who supported Gourley. Delegations switched allegiances for mysterious reasons in the dead of night; virtually everybody accused virtually everybody else of being gay. As The New Republic's Franklin Foer reported in a recent account of the CRNC convention, the Gourley-Davidson contest began in earnest after Norquist reminded delegates from the podium that "there are no rules in a knife fight."

(For more on the ugliness of the College Republicans, see this post.)

Comments

[DeanT]

This sounds a lot like the "...sex orgy staged by of a bunch of pot-smoking young Republicans at a D.C. convention" story made up by Stephen Glass. (link http://slate.msn.com/id/2074/ )

Just to hold one bit of it up to your too-good-to-be-true detector. Who do you really think could be convinced about something by mentioning "bisexual orgies"? Who thinks you can convince someone about something in that way? And isn't it just too perfect that he says it with a thick drawl?

I don't doubt that there is some truth to this article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, but it seems cartoonish to me.

Please wave your too-good-to-be-true detector over it once, and see if it flashes red or green.

[Jon Henke]

I'm nominally with Dean T on this, Brendan. I find the notion that there's bitter, dirty in-fighting among college Republicans very credible -- the TNR piece, for example.

But this is almost comical. First, it's supposed to be the training ground for future genius political strategists....and then it amounts to a bunch of frat boys calling each other "gay"? These two things are not the same.

[Jack Davis]

I was a member of the College Republicans when I was at the University of Florida and I can assure you nothing like this happened. Maybe things have changed, but I'm skeptical to put it mildly.

[DeanT]

I don't know if you follow the comments in your old posts, but...

Benjamin Wallace-Wells just did an article
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.wallace
-wells.html which caused complaints by KOS http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/22/16121/850

It looks like the story was embellished to make a better story. From KOS's complaint: "This isn't a hit piece. If anything, the errors make me sound more impressive than I actually am."

The errors make it a better story. Given the above too-good-to-be-true College Republican article, I doubt that those errors are mistakes.