Not Everyone Is On Board: HuffPo On The TNGOP
Posted on June 30, 2008 at 2:38 pmThe Huffington Post gets knee-deep into the story of the Tennessee Republican Party and the communications shop of Bill Hobbs:
Much of the Republican bile directed Obama’s way has come, observers say, from the state GOP’s communications director Bill Hobbs. A conservative activist and quasi-journalist, Hobbs is known as a somewhat controversial figure. In February 2006 he resigned from Belmont University in Nashville, where he was serving in the communications department, after posting a cartoon of a stick-figured Prophet Mohammed holding a bomb. The drawing, entitled “Mohammed Blows,” was meant to spotlight the media’s unwillingness to publish the infamous Danish cartoons on Islam.
The firing did not dissuade the Tennessee GOP from offering Hobbs a job, nor did it dissuade Hobbs from pushing the political envelop, which he has done with regularity since taking over the new post.
“I think that [Michelle Obama] video, which we put up on YouTube, struck a nerve. It struck a nerve with Democrats and they squealed and they squealed really loud, and it caused a big storm in the media,” he told the Huffington Post. As for whether a candidate’s wife should be off limits, he added, “It doesn’t matter if the campaign surrogate is married to the candidate or not. What campaign surrogates say on the campaign trail during the course of the campaign is fair game.”
But not everyone has been on board. And the reaction to Hobb’s work has become a telling illustration of just how difficult it has been for conservatives to settle on a line of attack against Obama. Tennessee’s two Republican Senators expressed reservations, with a staffer for Bob Corker demanding that the Michelle Obama spot be taken down, and a spokesman for Lamar Alexander suggesting that “there are probably better ways to communicate our pride in America.”
“You’ve got the more centrist, moderate Republicans who are frankly embarrassed by Hobbs,” said Ken Whitehouse, a political reporter for the Nashville Post. “I’ve got Republican members of the state legislature who are biding their time, keeping their mouth shut, but don’t like what he’s doing because he is drawing attention to himself and not the message. But at the same time you have people who want to fight and love him for it.”
Comments
2 Responses to “Not Everyone Is On Board: HuffPo On The TNGOP”
If you don’t fight now at this late date, you might as well lie down and let it roll over you. The center is not going to hold.
[...] recall that the national GOP took quite a bit of grief for Hobb’s actions, which, to those of us who remember his long history of anti-Muslim hysteria, was completely unsurprising. (See here for Hobbs’s political [...]