Bopp-Yue, Steering Committees, Mike Duncan & the RNC Chair Race

Since my post on Saturday, I have gotten a few emails from people making a further case for an alignment between Jim Bopp (and his efforts through the "Conservative Steering Committee" and the Bopp-Yue anti-bailout resolution) and current RNC chairman Mike Duncan.

First of all, this isn't Jim Bopp's first steering committee. He was the chair of one for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, too. This was Romney's "National Faith And Values Steering Committee," which was created as a front group to assuage the concerns of social conservatives (and other conservatives) with certain more liberal aspects of Romney's record, history, and past statements.

So it's not without precedent for Bopp to be on so-called steering committees designed to give faux conservative credentials to people with few readily available to them otherwise.

At the same time, Michael Steele seems to remain convinced that the Conservative Steering Committee headed by Bopp and Solomon Yue (who, with Bopp, wrote the anti-bailout resolution; quite the coincidence). Yue is an early-declared supporter of Mike Duncan (and Duncan retained Bopp as a lawyer for a campaign finance case being pursued by the RNC). Both, interestingly, were supporters of Mitt Romney.

The Steering Committee will meet with the candidates on Tuesday, the day after the debate between the chair candidates being sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform.

Notably:

Candidates will get five minutes to make their cases before being subjected to 25 minutes of questioning from committee members. The meeting will conclude with a straw poll during which committee members will render judgment on whether candidates are conservative enough and therefore acceptable, or unacceptable, as RNC chairs.

RNC members don't have to be present at the questioning (or apparently even see it) to vote. Mr. Bopp says that they can vote by email:

The strategist wondered if voting procedures were even in place: “Is it all just coming in to Bopp’s e-mail address?”

RNC Vice Chairman James Bopp Jr., who leads the Conservative Steering Committee, said questions about Tuesday’s voting procedures were “ignorant.”

“Exclusivity, if that is the complaint, is simply an attack on the right of free people to meet and associate with each other. Trying to use the RNC as a club to try and stop people from meeting together is like looking for a government bailout,” said Bopp, who added that the conservative group had grown to some 90 members. “We’ve sought out and invited every conservative member who agrees, you know, with our goals.”

Bopp said votes would be cast according to guidelines laid out in a Dec. 12, 2008, conference call and that members of the group who could not be present would be casting ballots by e-mail.

Natural and common sense questions about specific voting (or counting) procedures aside, one can't help but wonder about the casting of ballots by email.

If the point of the Conservative Steering Committee exercise is to question the candidates, learn about them, and so forth, then why are people that are not attending the questioning and thus won't be fully informed about the candidates going to be allowed to vote via email?

Mr. Bopp assures us that the point of this exercise is to ensure that the members of the RNC (and the Conservative Steering Committee) are more informed, to vet the candidates, and for members to discuss things among themselves:

“The whole purpose [of the Steering Committee] is to allow us to informally discuss matters,” Bopp told The Hill in an interview. Bopp and others in the group wanted “to have a forum for discussion among conservatives on the RNC with the goal of advancing the conservative policies of the RNC.”

“The effort has been to bring every conservative who is interested in sharing their thoughts and ideas and [who] would find it useful to have a discussion among conservatives,” Bopp said. “That doesn’t help or hurt any particular candidate.”

It's hard to see how some of these purposes will be served by people voting via email without even hearing the candidates out. One might reasonably and logically conclude, even if wrongly, that many of the members of this steering committee may have made their minds up already.

The rumor seems to be that the "Conservative Steering Committee" is a front to endorse Duncan, to give him "conservative cred" in the same way that the "National Faith And Values Steering Committee" was designed as a shell game to give Romney social conservative credentials that he never really earned.

At the same time, the argument goes that the Bopp-Yue resolution (from two people that were similarly behind the Conservative Steering Committee, and one of which has already endorsed Duncan) is designed to distance the RNC (and thus any chair candidate it might pick, even if it picked the current chairman) from the less-than-conservative policies of the current Republican administration.

Bopp-Yue, according to the theory, absolves the RNC and anyone it picks of any link to what George W. Bush did. This works especially for Mike Duncan. The "Conservative Steering Committee" would give Duncan cover with the angry conservative base, thus allowing the status quo to be perpetuated at the RNC and ensuring that no change comes there in the wake of the disaster that has befallen the party in the past two elections.

I'm not thinking that steering committees or national party committee resolutions are going to change things much. They're cosmetic, at best.

Even if their purpose is to retain Duncan and even if they succeed, they will lose in the long-run if the victory is achieved with false confidence games, vote-rigging, and various methods of tactical political trickery.

I'm more convinced from all of this that Mr. Bopp and Mr. Yue are looking to help retain Mike Duncan, at least more convinced than I was before (and I was pretty skeptical then). But it could well be a moot point.

Anything that comes out of the Conservative Steering Committee is going to be sandwiched between the ATR debate on Monday and the meeting of the full committee on Wednesday. The great tactical victory of the Conservative Steering Committee for Mike Duncan, if any (if any was ever intended), may have been tactically outmaneuvered (by a guy who said that only 168 people mattered in this decision, of all things; talk about irony).