Tag: Dick Wadhams

Loveland Republican Rep. Don Marostica has been tapped by Gov. Bill Ritter to become the state's chief economic development director. A member of...

Once upon a time, when Colorado GOP kingpin Dick Wadhams was referred to as “Rove 2.0”, the Las Animas political operative was on a fast track to manage a presidential campaign. U.S. Sen. George Allen's racist "macaca" gaffe uttered at a Virginia re-election campaign stop may have derailed then-campaign manager Wadham's direct trajectory toward the Big Kahuna. But long ties to a darkhorse 2012 Republican presidential candidate may give him another shot at a run at the White House.

Poor Wayne Allard. The recently retired Republican senator from Colorado seems to have gone down the memory hole at The Washington Times, like an out-of-favor Politburo member erased from history by Pravda.

He wasn't driving around in an unmarked van luring kids for a Fox news program and he wasn't provoking a pseudo-confrontation with university cops to garner news/documentary footage, but Colorado GOP aide Matt Milner is wading in the same swampy genre.

Colorado Independent readers, your citizen journalism moment has arrived. Rocky Mountain PBS talk show host Aaron Harber is requesting questions for his two-part series on the future of the Colorado Republican Party. But hurry, your deadline is 10 a.m. Monday.

It's always a good idea to take the news on April 1 with a shaker of salt and a glance at the calendar. On the morning of April Fool's Day, 2009, for instance, readers learned that Google is unveiling a new 3-D browser -- complete with red-blue glasses you can print at home. The venerable Guardian announced it would become the first newspaper in the world to publish entirely via Twitter, under the headline, "Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters." And Obama Attorney General Eric Holder is dropping the prosecution of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens for failing to disclose $250,000 in gifts from an oil tycoon to renovate his chalet, after obtaining a conviction. (It turns out all the salt in the world doesn't help with that last one -- Holder's not fooling.)

Hard on the heels of the Republican Party’s third straight pasting at the hands of Colorado voters, GOP leaders agree on one thing: It’s time to dig in those heels. The reason Republicans keep losing elections, party members agreed at this weekend’s state GOP gathering, isn’t that voters reject the party’s approach; it’s that Republicans have strayed from their roots.

On the heels of thumping losses in last fall's election, Colorado Republicans decided Saturday to stick with the one that brung 'em. State GOP Chairman Dick Wadhams easily won re-election to a second two-year term with 85 percent of the vote at the party's central committee meeting. Wadhams rebuffed challenges from former Eagle County Commissioner Tom Stone and party activist Christine Tucker, who threw her support to Stone at the end of her nomination speech.

While we're introducing much of the state to little-known Colorado Republican Party chair candidate Tom Stone it makes sense to revisit our 2007 coverage of Dick Wadhams when he sought to ascend the GOP throne. Now that Stone has been dubbed "Eagle County's Rush Limbaugh" by a member of his own party, we'll see how he matches up to Wadhams, the über-operative not-so-affectionately called "Karl Rove 2.0."

If you ask Ron Wolfe, the Republican mayor of Avon, Tom Stone has played a major role in marginalizing his party in Eagle County, where there was a Democratic sweep in November and the GOP trails in voter registration for the first time in recent memory. And as Republicans continue to take stock of their defeats nationally and locally, there's debate over whether Stone, a Realtor and former county commissioner, would be a better GOP party chairman than Dick Wadhams.