Who says the GOP gubernatorial primary is over? Frontrunner Scott McInnis went on the FOX News Neil Cavuto show yesterday and Cavuto and his Washington DC-based researchers managed to get everything backwards. They touted McInnis as “the country’s biggest Tea Party candidate” to the chagrin of local Tea Party activists and leaders, who fired out angry emails to correct the record. They called the “Platform for Prosperity” McInnis drafted to win them over mere “propaganda” and “B.S.” Their emails also mentioned Dan Maes, Evergreen businessman and last GOP gubernatorial grassroots candidate standing!
In short, the Tea Partiers watching FOX were served up a heap of untruth and this time they know it. Bob Moore at his Fort Collins Coloradoan blog has the rich details. Excerpts and the FOX video after the jump.
Cavuto leads the segment by describing McInnis as “the country’s biggest tea party candidate. He is running for governor of Colorado and he is leading.” The part about running for governor of Colorado at least is true. The rest, less true.
Indeed, the words running on the bottom of the screen under McInnis’s face, “Tea-Party Backed Candidate,” seemed designed to enrage the state’s grassroots conservatives. Cavuto’s fantasy that a real Tea Party candidate was winning the governor’s race here in purple Colorado– “news” designed to give heart to tea partiers across the country– was of course all wrong.
McInnis is the establishment candidate. The Tea Party groups in Colorado want nothing to do with the establishment. They see McInnis and his big money backers as having prematurely pushed out conservative state senator Josh Penry. None of the major Tea Party groups in the state have endorsed McInnis and when or if they do (see below), they will go about it holding their noses, a fact that will go unreported by blustery Cavuto.
From Bob Moore’s blog:
Northern Colorado’s two biggest Tea Party groups, the Tea Party of Northern Colorado and the Loveland 9-12 Project, sent out emails Wednesday and Thursday to their members attacking McInnis.
“It’s one thing for McInnis to run lock step with his party, that’s his choice, but to actually mislead the media and the public to believe he has the support of We The People is nothing short of dishonest,” said an e-mail by Lesley Hollywood of the Tea Party of Northern Colorado. “We are being played like pawns. And we can’t put up with it.”
Nancy Rumfelt of the Loveland 9-12 Project sounded a similar theme in her e-mail: “The process has been corrupted by the parties (both do this) and this is why we never really get to have a choice of candidates as the party decides who the candidate should be based on money, deals, power, etc. We must demand that we want PRINCIPLE over PARTY (P.O.P.)!!!”
… [Although] the “Platform for Prosperity” was designed by Colorado Republican leaders to appeal to the values of the Tea Party movement… Harvey and Rumfelt aren’t buying it.
“Although the Platform for Prosperity sounds rather pleasing rolling (off) the tongue, it is nothing but a propaganda tool,” Hollywood said. “Now I don’t know about you, but I am burnt out on propaganda. And I’m burnt out on rhetoric. I’m ready to hear the truth.”
Rumfelt was more even blunt: “The Prosperity Platform that the ‘elite’ came up with in their ivory tower is seen by all of us for what it is: B.S. or the polite term propaganda and contrary to what he says I know that the majority of Tea Party and 9-12 members do not support this platform and recognize it for what it is.”
The People’s Press Collective, a conservative Colorado blog, has also run this story and includes the full email sent by Lesley Hollywood of the Northern Colorado Tea Party to Dick Wadhams, head of the Colorado GOP. She says “NO ONE” of her people will be voting for McInnis, whom she sees as a RINO– a Republican in Name Only. It’s a stinger of a letter. She should have ccd Cavuto.
All in all, the big national FOX News interview probably hurt McInnis more than it helped him with the state’s FOX News viewers.
This article requires revision and better fact checking. There has never been a person named Lesley Hollywood. Rather, there is a woman who uses aliases to hide her background. The real name of the person that illegally goes by the name Lesley Hollywood is Lesley Anne Schoonmaker.
Nicole you sound very bitter, perhaps it’s because Lesley is far more important to us!