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Bradley in DC
08-05-2009, 08:38 AM
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/25812.html

Republicans on a road trip to recruit
By: Patrick O'Connor
August 5, 2009 04:16 AM EST

For many Americans, August can mean only one thing: road trip!

From Jack Kerouac to Chevy Chase, restless men have always hit the highway in search of something that’s missing in their lives. Add to the list GOP Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Lynn Westmoreland, who will climb into a rental car later this month for a series of trips to parts of the country where Republicans haven’t been particularly welcome lately.

Their quest: Find the candidates who will help lead their party out of the wilderness.

“If you’re going to build this party back, you’ve got to go where you haven’t been,” says McCarthy, an up-and-coming Republican from Southern California.

McCarthy and Westmoreland will hit some of the usual battlegrounds — the Chicago suburbs, eastern Ohio and the like. But the pair will also make stops in some Southern districts where the GOP rarely fields a serious contender — places like eastern North Carolina and central Tennessee.

For the first time since George W. Bush won a second term in the White House, Republicans believe that the political winds are starting to blow in their favor. But an improving climate won’t mean a thing if the party’s congressional leaders can’t put candidates in place to capitalize on any momentum they can generate over the next 16 months.

The goal now is to recruit Republicans to run against incumbent Democrats who haven’t had a close race in years, Democrats such as Mike McIntyre and Bart Gordon. By expanding the playing field, Republicans will have candidates in seats that Bush won in 2004 — i.e., seats where they have at least a chance of winning if the Democrats’ agenda collapses under its own weight or President Barack Obama’s approval ratings go into free-fall.

And even if the Democrats avoid such a doomsday scenario, having more credible candidates would let the GOP force some of these entrenched incumbents to spend more money on their own races rather than give it to their more typically vulnerable colleagues.

“It’s less likely we’re on defense, and it’s more likely we’re on offense,” McCarthy said of his recruiting efforts.

Of course, the strategy isn’t a new one; Democrats employed it with great success in 2006 and again in 2008. “That’s basically what Rahm Emanuel did,” Westmoreland said of the current White House chief of staff who led the Democrats’ successful effort to win back the House in 2006.

But execution is the key.

McCarthy likes to talk about Van Tran, a Vietnamese-born Orange County Republican he has recruited to run against Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez. Tran raised more than $250,000 in his first three months campaigning, ensuring Sanchez will have a fight on her hands for the first time in years.

But Tran faces a stiff uphill climb to unseat the incumbent, and Republicans need a lot more candidates like him to give the Democrats any serious headaches next year.

Republicans already have candidates for most of the typical targets: former Reps. Steve Chabot and Steve Pearce are both running to regain their old seats in Ohio and New Mexico, respectively; Steve Stivers and Andy Harris are waging rematches against first-year Democrats Mary Jo Kilroy and Frank Kratovil Jr. in Ohio and Maryland, respectively; and party leaders are touting new recruits they hope can win seats the Republicans recently lost in Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois and New Hampshire.

But they’re still searching for the right people to challenge second-term Reps. Bruce Braley in Iowa and Zack Space in eastern Ohio. So McCarthy will travel to both districts to meet with local donors and talk to Republicans who might be interested in running against them.

He and Westmoreland hatched the idea of an August road trip in the basement of the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican watering hole a few steps from the House office buildings. McCarthy chairs the recruitment efforts for the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Westmoreland serves on his team.

During a trip to Oregon earlier this year, McCarthy discovered that local donors knew a lot more about things on the ground than party operatives back in Washington. They steered him in the direction of a few potential candidates that he either didn’t know or didn’t know would be interested.

McCarthy hopes to glean similar information on his August trips. And even if he doesn’t, he figures he can spread some goodwill with a base that has lost its patience with party leaders.

“I might not get candidates, but I will make a few new friends,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy and Westmoreland start their summer sojourn in Chicago next week in search of candidates to replace Republican Rep. Mark Kirk, who just launched a Senate bid, and to find someone to run against Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean. From there, they will head west to Iowa, where they will meet with candidates and donors in the two districts that snake along the Mississippi, belonging to Braley and veteran Democratic Rep. Leonard Boswell.

Once that leg of the journey is complete, the two Republicans will head to North Carolina in search of like-minded candidates to run against McIntyre, who won his last race with 69 percent of the vote, and Rep. Bob Etheridge, another veteran incumbent who won reelection last fall with 67 percent of the vote. Then they drive west, up into the mountains around Asheville, in search of someone to unseat second-term Rep. Heath Shuler, one of Emanuel’s most coveted recruits from 2006, who has done just about everything possible to insulate himself from Republican attacks.

From there, McCarthy will head to central Tennessee looking for candidates to put pressure on a trio of Blue Dogs — Jim Cooper, Lincoln Davis and Bart Gordon — who are already under pressure from their constituents to answer for Obama’s ambitious first-year agenda. Gordon, in particular, cast key votes in favor of a controversial energy and climate change bill and, most recently, a sweeping health care package that is becoming a political flash point in the Bush districts.

During stretches of the trip, McCarthy and Westmoreland will be joined by NRCC political director Brian Walsh, who will be responsible for managing the map — and the money — when the action heats up next year.

McCarthy will finish the month with trips to Arizona, Colorado and eastern Ohio. NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions will also travel to western Pennsylvania to find Republicans to run against second-term Rep. Jason Altmire and first-year Rep. Kathleen Dahlkemper.

Once the road trips are done, the NRCC will begin flying candidates and their campaign staffs back to Washington for intensive training programs, so that each is running off the same template by this time next year.

“We want the party to be stronger,” McCarthy said. “We want the candidates to be stronger. We want the donors to be stronger.”

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Ryan Rudominer was dismissive of the Republicans’ summer plans.

“Based on what we’ve seen so far, Republicans are touting a recruiting class filled with a bank lobbyist and former members who were best known for rubber-stamping the failed Bush agenda that created an economic catastrophe,” he said.

Rudominer’s boss, DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), will be hitting the road in a much more modest way this month.

“I’ll be traveling to the districts where our candidates are,” he said. “Primarily in the mid-Atlantic, but we’re going to be looking at other candidates, as well. We’ve got candidates in Pennsylvania, we’ve got candidates in Delaware, and we’ve got other candidates, as well.”

That’s hardly a glamorous summer-vacation schedule, and Westmoreland says the stakes are too high for any road-movie hijinks anyway. Taking a good-natured swipe at colleagues who will spend their summer in a more relaxed mode, Westmoreland joked: “We’re not going to be playing tennis or sitting by the pool. There’s no codel here.”