The GOP snub factor
Utah Republican insiders seem to have trouble with invitations. Remember Rep. Carl Wimmer of Herriman, who last summer — after being defeated in his run for Congress — announced that he had been hired as political director of the Nevada Republican Party? Wimmer even traveled to Nevada to start work before finding out that he hadn’t been hired after all. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the party had not hired anyone. He said he had never met Wimmer and that the party’s board hadn’t signed off. Wimmer apparently got the idea that he’d been hired from one of McDonald’s top aides.
I have no doubt that the aide tendered the offer after a stupendous miscommunication. Clearly, certain somebodies in high command had been talking seriously about Wimmer — so seriously that the aide thought there was a green light. At 20 miles per gallon, the round trip to Vegas had to have cost Wimmer at least 150 bucks in gasoline alone.
Anyway, now the Utah County Republican Party seems to have acquired the same malady. Invite someone to do something and then deny it. Glenn Reynolds, otherwise known as the purveyor of Instapundit.com, was apparently invited to be a guest speaker at the Utah County GOP Lincoln Dinner in February. But then he was uninvited — he says because somebody found out about his decidedly libertarian views on gay rights.
That sounds plausible. But Utah County GOP chairman David Acheson is jamming the gears in full reverse. “He didn’t get an official invitation, ever,”Acheson said. “This is an operational thing where he didn’t check his sources. … No one in leadership, not in the steering committee, not in the central committee or the executive committee, has approved any invitation to anyone for the dinner.”
An “operational thing” where a social guest who has been invited to something is supposed to “check his sources”? So if my son invites Acheson to dinner, Acheson needs to double-check with me, my mother, my other two sons, my Aunt Irma and Great Dane Brutus before accepting? If this gets out, it will put a definite kink in my social life. Whatever happened to good manners?