The One True Write-In Is Not Alone & ‘Show Me The Money’

The Republican Party (nationally) now has a great excuse to not give Shelley Sekula-Gibbs that promised $3 million dollars, which—let’s face it—only about five people in the entire state thought would materialize anyway.

It seems that former (perennial?) Congressional and U.S. Senate candidate (from the ‘93 free-for-all) Don Richardson didn’t ask the Secretary of State to remove him from the list of eligible write-in candidates.

Meanwhile, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs (the One True Write-In), having not evidently ever heard of Federal Express, traveled to Austin today to file her paperwork to run—if that’s what you want to call it.

For Bend Now looks upon the failure of Richardson to withdraw as an ominous sign of an evidently impending apocalypse for Sekula-Gibbs:

The move threatens to further confuse voters in what has already been an extremely complicated congressional campaign. And having two GOP write-in candidates in the race may jeopardize funding from national Republican Party sources.

Contacted at his home Tuesday night, Richardson said he is still in the race despite telling GOP officials and precinct chairs at an Aug. 17 gathering in Pearland that he would drop out.

First of all, following Rick Perry’s decision to call a special election for election day (how brilliant!), could one more write-in candidate confuse voters any more than what they have now? As for Richardson not withdrawing, it can only mean good news for Democrats as, after all, the write-in vote can now be split to some degree at least.

At the Pearland gathering, Texas GOP Chairman Tina Benkiser “got up and said the Republican National Committee would put up $4 million if and only if” there were a single write-in candidate in the race, Richardson said.
It also seems Richardson actually called Tina Fish Benkiser’s bluff on that three million (which Fort Bend Now has now upped mysteriously to FOUR million), as well as the bluff of the RNC:

But the next morning, he called an official at the RNC in Washington, D.C. “I said put it in writing” that $4 million would be available to the single GOP candidate running as a write-in against Lampson, Richardson said.

He didn’t hear back. On Friday, Richardson said, he sent a fax to RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, to the RNC official to whom he’d originally spoken, and to Benkiser.

“I said look, if you’ll put it in writing about the $4 million and refund my campaign expenses…I will withdraw,” Richardson said. “I haven’t heard from anybody. So my name is still on the ballot.”

First of all, he was probably calling the wrong office. It seems to me he should have been calling someone at the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.

Anyway, given the implications of McCain-Feingold and the reality that the three or four million would have likely been in indirect expenditures and not an actual donation to the campaign, I think if the RNC had publiclly admitted to offering it, they might have had some serious problems.

I’m also hearing from a trusted source inside the D.C. Beltway (don’t you wish you had one of those) that a number of Republican Congressmen, including at least one from Texas (who I’ve promised not to name) and others in marginal districts around the nation, were hotly pissed about the prospect of three million GOP dollars being flushed down a toilet in Sugar Land, Texas.

Given that the GOP is fighting to hold onto the U.S. House as it is, the conventional but unspoken wisdom in D.C. seems to be the money is better spent elsewhere and to write off DeLay’s seat for this cycle, given there are other marginal districts where three million would make a greater difference and go farther than in the terribly expensive media market of the Houston area.

The other part of that unspoken conventional wisdom is that the write-in situation is DeLay’s fault. Given that he’s part of the reason for massive negative GOP publicity over the last couple of years, some Congressional Republicans and party leaders around the country are supposedly not to interested in spending any more money to clean up one of his messes.

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