The Dark Horse

While the Blogosphere is white hot with discussion about the Chairman’s race for the Republican Party of Iowa, the way I see it, no candidate is close to garnering the nine votes required to be elected. At best one of the candidates may have five votes, but getting to nine is proving to be a difficult task. There is no doubt that this is as volatile of a chair race that many of us have ever seen.

That said; this is the perfect environment for a dark horse candidate to emerge. Some had thought that Strawn was the dark horse, but I had heard rumblings about his quest for chair right after the November elections so I’m not sure that I would classify him as a dark horse.

All I know that with none of the current candidates being able to approach the nine votes needed a dark horse candidate probably has a better shot at winning than most of the current candidates with their hats in the ring. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing either.

Yesterday the Flyover Boys did a great job in describing what we should be looking for in a chair. While many have stated that the best breeding ground for leaders of the party is our grass roots county organizations, I disagree. Our county organizations have many great people associated with them and I mean no disrespect to those people, but the chair of the party needs to be the CEO. I think that is exactly what they Flyover Boys made clear in their post yesterday.

We need a chair that can raise millions of dollars.

We need a chair that will have instant respect from major donors, legislators, Vaudt, Northey, King, Latham, and Grassley.

We need a chair that understands our grassroots activists and wants to help them.

We need a chair who doesn’t want to water down what our party stands for, but wants to create bold contrasts between Republicans and Democrats, but also refuse to walk away from our conservative principles.

There are very few people in Iowa who fill that bill, but they do exist. Recent guys who have raised that kind of money are former statewide and federal candidates like Jim Nussle, Doug Gross, Mike Whalen, and Jeff Lamberti. While they all have baggage from their losing campaigns, we would be stupid not to do all we can to keep them involved with the party.

Another name that gets kick around as a potential gubernatorial candidate is Bruce Rastetter. There is a debate on whether he wants to run for Governor or be a king maker in Iowa politics. If he’s the later, than he’s a name that deserves consideration. Rastetter clearly has an interest in Republican politics and he has been a major player in a multiple cycles.

As for me, I’m a patient man. I’ll wait until the first of the year or so to see what the field looks like them because I don’t think the field is set yet.

What say you?

(Keep it clean and positive please. Some of you went over the line yesterday.)