Reaction to the Augusta County GOP flap looks like HB3202 in reverse

Brandon Bell (Roanoke Red Zone) decided to offer his two cents on the Augusta County brouhaha.  He wasn’t very kind to the supporters of Kurt Michael:

So you ask, is this the way to build a party? Is this the way to heal old wounds? We all know the answer. But I’ve come to realize something. Michael and crowd don’t care. They never have. And they don’t really care about ideology. What they care about is power. And they will do anything, including the destruction of their own party, to get it and keep it.

Naurally, Michael’s supporters responded in kind - in comments and on their won blogs (Spank That Donkey, Spark it Up!, and SWAC Girl).  Bell fired another rhetorical shot as I was writing this, all but ensuring the fun and games will last the rest of the week.

Now, this may be as a result of the heavy SWAC population in the blogosphere, but it looks to me like this thing has the potential to be a defining issue for the Valley-and-other-parts-west blogs.  In part, it’s just Phase II of the battle versus Emmett Hanger and his own constituents, meaning it has a long, long way to go.

That said, the western folks may be a bit surprised at how little attention this is getting here in the east.  To the extent of a reaction at all, most of it has been either confusion or the old pox-on-both-houses routine.  To date, I think Jim Riley and I are the only bloggers east of the mountains to have been rooting for either faction.  In some ways, it looks a lot like HB3202 in reverse: a huge deal in western Virginia, while a bit of a yawner in eastern Virginia.  However, the fact that Riley and I both backed Michael (and why) means very bad news for Hanger and his clique, no matter who is Augusta GOP Chair.

I know the folks out west have their passionate views.  Many of Hanger’s supporters know him personally, are fiercely loyal to him, and can’t fathom why anyone would think badly of him.  Those who don’t know him yet still support him (or, for those on the left, think he’s more palatable than the Michael crowd) see a very social conservative legislator who happens to be a “centrist” on “fiscal” issues, and don’t understand why Michael et al can’t accept him for what he is.

Hanger’s opponents (and Michael’s supporters), focus on Hanger’s “centrism” as the first of several problems.  Mostly, though (and this is from what I’ve gleaned from so far away), they see a politician who has “gone native,” i.e., conforming to the Richmond elite version of what a Republican Senator should be.  Michael, therefore, is a hero for calling Hanger out.

For those of us in the eastern part of the state, however, almost none of that gets past the mountains.  All we see are the lead actors: Emmett Hanger and Kurt Michael.

This will likely shock many western VA bloggers (and reveal once again the deep geographic divide within the state), but for most easterners, calling Emmett Hanger a conservative of any kind is utterly laughable.  A politician who votes for tax increases five seperate times in five years (2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008, and that doesn’t include his vote for HB3202, all links from the Legislative Information Service) yet still calls himself a Republican is simply known as a tax-hiking cipher.  Kurt Michael could have set the mass meeting call on fire in the middle of his speech, and a lot of us would still take his side over Emmett down here.

This is something that, I fear, most westerners don’t understand, namely that social issues don’t drive the party base in the east.  Economic issues motivate eastern right-wingers, and more to the point, it is on economic issues where independents, wavering Republicans, and middle-of-the-road Democrats in the east are closest to the Republican Party.

For westerners, this may be about personalities, factional control, or genuine issues (truth be told, Hanger’s opponents out there seem most driven by the last of these - but I would say that, I guess), but here, battling and defeating politicians like Emmett Hanger isn’t just a matter of principle; it is essential for the party’s survival. I thought we had learned this lesson in the election of 2007.  Do we really have to learn it again?