Stupid Party Is Stupid

Whatever the opposite of fabulous is, it might include Randy Forbes:

Virginia Rep. Randy Forbes, a senior House Republican eyeing a powerful committee chairmanship, is causing friction with some of his colleagues by pushing the House GOP campaign arm to deny support for some of the party’s gay congressional candidates.

Forbes has waged a lengthy crusade to convince his colleagues and the National Republican Congressional Committee brass they shouldn’t back some gay candidates. His efforts on Capitol Hill were described to POLITICO by more than a half-dozen sources with direct knowledge of the talks.

The issue is particularly acute because House Republicans have two promising openly gay candidates in 2014 vying for seats held by Democrats. Richard Tisei, who narrowly lost to Democratic Rep. John Tierney in 2012, is running again in northeastern Massachusetts. And in San Diego, Carl DeMaio, a former city councilman, is trying to knock off Democratic Rep. Scott Peters.
…
When asked if he would withhold political contributions to the NRCC if they backed DeMaio, Forbes said, “I’m not going to be hypothetical on what we would or wouldn’t do at this particular point in time because you’ve got a lot of scenarios. I don’t think we’ve had primaries and nominations to nominate people. So I don’t want to prejudge.”

The NRCC is right not to get involved in picking primary winners — that’s for the voters to decide. Period.

But the NRCC’s job is to get the nominees elected. Period. So when Forbes says he won’t say whether the NRCC would support a particular nominee, he’s hinting that the voters had best “chose wisely” if they want their candidate to receive NRCC support.

So the way I read this is, Forbes wants to post a “No Gays Allowed” sign in front of the House GOP caucus.

Rather than go on and on about how stupid that is, I’ll just borrow Stacy McCain’s formulation again: You don’t build a winning coalition by a process of subtraction.