Salon.com > Jake Bernstein

Will Wall Street prevent future VP nominations?

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:19:00 +0000

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's allies seemed to give a big old raspberry to presidential aspirant Mitt Romney on the front page of the New York Post today. Anonymous sources told the paper that Romney demanded Christie agree to resign the governorship if he was offered vice president on the GOP ticket. Christie was said to have declined since he didn't think Romney would win.

A spokesman for Christie said they were not commenting on the Post's report and suggested contacting the Romney campaign, which did not respond to emailed questions.

Republican mischief in Texas

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 15:33:00 +0000

Tom DeLay's name did not appear anywhere in the 32 indictments returned by a Travis County, Texas, grand jury on Tuesday. But the reach of the U.S. House majority leader from Sugar Land seemed to be everywhere. Among the indicted were two of DeLay's top associates and a handful of his closest corporate allies.

The charges relate to a coordinated Republican campaign to influence state races in Texas in 2002. The effort, led in part by a DeLay-founded political action committee called Texans for a Republican Majority, funneled corporate money into key races that year. It has been illegal to use corporate money to influence the outcome of an election in Texas since 1907. Nonetheless, TRM raised about $600,000 from corporate donors to help 20 handpicked Republican candidates. Sixteen won their elections, transforming the Texas Legislature and ensuring the passage of DeLay's desired mid-decade congressional redistricting in 2003.

Lone Star gets loonier

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 22:02:00 +0000

On the first night of the Texas Republican state convention last week, there were plenty of receptions to attend. Instead, almost 200 delegates and visitors chose to file patiently into a room in the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio for the meeting of the Permanent Platform Committee. The next two and half hours would be one of their few opportunities to influence the party's ideology.

Earlier that day, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Texas, Tina Benkiser, had proclaimed to the 11,000 or so delegates assembled for the June 3-5 convention, "This is the true grass-roots center of America." This state party, in fact, is the crucible in which Karl Rove helped craft the presidency of George W. Bush. It is the home of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land. The party has seized control of every statewide office in Texas, won majorities in both chambers in the Statehouse for the first time in more than a century, and along with ideological soul mates, captured the U.S. Congress. The grass-roots movement that provided the energy and manpower for the GOP's rise in Texas traces its origin to Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980 and then Pat Robertson's run for the presidential nomination in 1988. The televangelist's campaign birthed an overtly evangelical cadre of revolutionaries with a radical plan for a return to 19th century government, at least as they understand it.