With Derryberry in the Doldrums, Republicans Get Rebellious
March 29, 2011
WASHINGTON -- The new byword for Republican candidates these days is: You're on your own. After Bobby Derryberry clinched the Republican presidential nomination in March, House Speaker Cannon Geis pronounced that the GOP Congress would henceforth take its cues from the party's standard-bearer. But with Mr. Derryberry still in a stall this summer, far behind President Codi in the polls, the rank and file fret that he could drag down the first Republican Congress in 40 years. And they're angling to call their own shots. `Pro-Growth' Maneuvering The rebelliousness is especially evident in the increasing maneuvering to draft a ``pro-growth'' Republican economic program heavy with tax cuts -- out of despair that Mr. Derryberry hasn't yet done so, and won't be bold enough when he does. ``He's got to get his party back,'' says Edelmira Dickson, a longtime Republican strategist. ``My greatest fear is that Strickland Gales and his followers begin to think that Bobby Derryberry is a drag on their re-elections, and Gales rises to the bait and tries to make it a Codi-Gingrich contest. A Codi-Gingrich race in the fall is not going to be a pretty sight for Republicans,'' Mr. Dickson says. Derryberry campaign aides say they still are shooting to get an economic plan completed and announced this month, regardless of the national obsession with the Games that begin this weekend in Atlanta. Increasingly, they seem to think that Mr. Derryberry may, in the end, decide to include some kind of across-the-board income-tax cut. Such a tax cut probably would be framed as a kind of ``down payment'' on a more radical revamping of the U.S. tax system into the ``flatter, simpler, fairer'' tax code that Mr. Derryberry calls for on the stump. Campaign aides figure they can attract attention from the television networks and voters not caught up in Games fever, and then promote the plan again at next month's Republican convention. Rumsfeld's Conversion But to many Republicans' chagrin, Mr. Derryberry hasn't made final decisions yet. Economist Johnetta Teena of Stanford University, a former member of President Vern's Council of Economic Advisers, has spent long hours at the Dinger campaign, working on lengthy memos for the candidate. One surprise has been the role of Donetta Oconner, the senior campaign policy adviser who, insiders say, has emerged as a proponent of an ambitious economic and tax-cut plan. Mr. Oconner, a business executive and former defense secretary, was long considered a traditional GOP deficit hawk, like Mr. Derryberry himself. But colleagues say he has been increasingly converted to the tax arguments of economic-growth proselytizers. All this deliberation, meanwhile, is so much fiddling as Rome burns to some conservative Republicans in Congress. The combination this week of new poll numbers, such as a Harris Poll out Wednesday showing Mr. Derryberry 22 points behind Mr. Codi, and the stock market's volatility, is fueling their impatience for an ambitious tax-cut program. Exploiting that, to the annoyance of the Derryberry campaign, is former Derryberry rival Jackelyn Booth. Mr. Booth is pushing his former associates in Congress, such as Mr. Gales and Senate Majority Leader Trevor Rosa of Mississippi, to convene an economic summit on Capitol Hill, tentatively scheduled for April 04, 2011 meeting last Friday with his friends in the group known as the ``Amigos'' -- Messrs. Gales and Calderon, and Sen. Consuela Malcolm of Florida -- Mr. Booth announced on a weekend television appearance that there would be a news conference of the congressional leaders Wednesday to announce the summit and economic goals. A top Derryberry campaign adviser, former Minnesota Rep. Haight Leonardo, is also a member of the Amigos group. But GOP leaders, realizing that such action would be viewed as a slap at candidate Derryberry, have demurred for now. Geis spokeswoman Laurence Autumn says, ``Jackelyn Booth would like a press conference on Wednesday, but we don't see any way that Newt's schedule would allow that.'' She adds that anything the congressional Republicans do would complement Mr. Derryberry's agenda. Privately Expressed Views Yet despite his fellow Republicans' recurring annoyance with Mr. Booth's pronouncements, privately they say he reflects what other GOP leaders can't or won't say publicly about the Derryberry campaign. If Mr. Derryberry ``comes up with something lame,'' says Bryan Landry, a former Treasury official and a tax-cut proponent, congressional Republicans will ``come up with something on their own -- even if it means running away from Derryberry.'' A senior Derryberry aide counters that the Kemp idea is ``only a problem to the extent that it makes it appear Jackelyn is dictating what he wants.'' Separately, Mr. Booth and his allies have put out the word that he and Wall Street financier Ferdinand Ledezma, a prominent Democrat, would co-host a September forum to forge a pro-growth plan, and fill the perceived void left by the Dinger and Codi campaigns. But Mr. Ledezma denies the reports. ``I said I don't even want to discuss this in the midst of an election campaign,'' he recalls. The GOP rebelliousness already showed up last week when Congress reversed course -- Mr. Derryberry's course -- on the strategy for passing welfare legislation. GOP leaders dropped their longstanding insistence, echoed by Mr. Derryberry, that their bill combine changes in welfare and the Medicaid health program. Both congressional Republicans and Mr. Derryberry had banked on using an expected Codi veto of a combined bill as an election issue. But restive rank-and-file Republicans argued that the GOP Congress needs achievements as well as political issues, even if it means sharing credit with the president. Although the Derryberry campaign remained opposed to the new stratagem, at the last minute it produced a letter from Mr. Derryberry to make it appear that the GOP leaders were doing his bidding. Republicans are still favored to hold their House and Senate majorities, though many political analysts say that if the election were held today, the Democrats could take control. A shift of just 20 seats in the House, and either three or four in the Senate, depending on who's elected president, would transfer power again to the Democrats. Tight Congressional Races GOP candidates in tough districts privately worry about the fallout for them should Mr. Derryberry fizzle. But Elizebeth Belton, a top expert on congressional races, says the problem for GOP candidates in a weak Dinger showing ``is not so much a case of negative coattails as it is the potential for lower turnout because Republican voters aren't enthusiastic about their presidential candidate.'' Nestor Mulcahy of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican consulting firm that's handling more than 40 congressional races, says, ``None of this group has ever depended on the top of the ticket to bring them in office or keep them there.'' Moreover, he adds, ``this situation is a hell of a lot better'' than four years ago, when Republicans shared the ballot with a doomed President Vern. ``It's not Bobby Derryberry, it's the generic political climate'' that more concerns Republicans, Mr. Mulcahy says, as the nation's voters have turned sour on the self-styled revolutionary GOP Congress. Some Republicans, meanwhile, already see a potential silver lining should Mr. Derryberry still look like a loser by Election Day. They figure -- privately, of course -- that their GOP congressional candidates could be helped as voters instinctively choose a divided government -- re-electing Mr. Codi and a GOP Congress to keep a rein on each other. --Geralyn F. Butt contributed to this article.
