#ncgop: Apparently, it’s ALL about Dee (Stewart).
Civitas outed him and another consultant in an exposé about the seedy side of the alternative energy game. NCGOP vice-chairman Carolyn Justice says he played a big part in her decision to back out of her reelection bid:
Even 6th district GOP chairman A.J. Daoud, reportedly considering a run for NCGOP chairman, has evoked Dee Stewart’s name in anger — in response to some alleged mudslinging:
Consultants are normally in the background when the combat breaks out. This year, you’d almost think Dee was running for something.
So who has the courage to get up in front of the NCGOP convention and ask how many millions in consulting fees Dee has milked out of the corruption? Anyone?
Dee attacked Daoud to elevate him as the challenger to Collins. Choose your (weaker) enemy and you will win. Dee just showed his hand and proved that he fears his client Collins will have to face the grassroots and Hasan Harnett.
Sorry, but that tactic only has any value when a candidate does not need a majority to win. Stewart might not be the brightest bulb in the box (he would probably be one of those twisty compact flourescent things), but I think he probably knows enough not to waste his time on a useless tactic like you suggest.
> Sorry, but that tactic only has any value when a candidate does not need a majority to win.
The NCGOP chairman vote requires 51% to win, but after the first vote only two candidates are in the race. If you have a lukewarm candidate like Collins then you elevate a weak candidate like Daoud to be the second place candidate. In a Daoud vs. Collins race enough of the Harnett voters will abstain for Collins will win.
Progressives have used the exact same tactic on Conservative Republicans in Presidential primaries. They stuck the Conservative Republicans with McCain and Romney and the Conservatives stayed home.
Why do you think Daoud is a weak candidate. I think he could be a very strong candidate. He is very well known across the state and I think he has a lot of goodwill with the republicans that will be delegates to the convention.
If you take away the payday Collins wants would he still be trying to be Chairman? That is the question the delegates need to ask. Is this person trying to be the Chairman to help the party or to help himself?
Now that’s funny. i hope you sincerely don’t believe that Stewart is attacking Daoud to elevate him…. If you do, it clearly shows you have no concept of Stewart. Not everything is a conspiracy theory. Most of the time it is exactly what it is, in this case trying to eliminate a challenger before he is a challenger. Rumors are that Daoud was threatened privately by a candidate. . . If your premise is true, there would be no need for that. But when the private doesn’t work, turn to the public.
Haha.. you think Daoud is a serious candidate and all of Stewarts attacks are designed to damage? So the attack on Daoud for being a Democrat thirty years ago was the genius Stewart at work? Now THAT is funny.
Well everyone should challenge Collins on the big payday he wants if he wins this election
The NC GOP needs Volunteer Chairman and a Volunteer Vice Chair
Collins I am told wants to eliminate the Executive director position so he can get Todd Poole’s paycheck also. Double the money.
I chairman term is only 2 years the state office need a skilled long term Executive Director to last over multiple chairmanships
as far as I know Todd Poole has done a great as Executive Director and not reason to even think about getting rid of him unless it is his own decision
The party needs the separation of the Executive Director and Chairman. While I know in the past some people did both jobs and did them good. I think times have changed and the job of running the state party and all that is evolved dictates that the structure should remain the same.
a hired Executive Director could be fired. What do you do to a elected chairman doing both roles bad. In this case the state office would be like a sinking ship.
the delegates need to speak up.
the delegates need to demand the truth
and the delegates need wisdom to understand the ramifications of all of this
The NCGOP need a Volunteer Chairman and Volunteer Vice-Chair with a Hired Executive Director
Dee Stewart has a long and slimy history in smearing GOP political opponents ever since his old College Republican mentor David Miner brought him into NC politics. We would all be better off if he had stayed in Iowa.
I suspect that Daoud is taking so long to get in because he knows how Stewart works and the kinds of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies he throws at opponents. Chad Adams found out when he ran for NCGOP chairman against Tommy Fetzer. Conservative former state senator Fern Shubert and former state representative Robert Brawley found out when they ran against Stewart backed RINOs. Stewart is at his most despicable worst late in campaigns when it is too late for an opponent to respond. That is when he really slings the lies.
Stewart is a RINO consultant who works against conservatives. He has recently been working to try to prop up liberal Congresswoman Renee Ellmers, and Brant mentioned the way he has whored himself to the green left to oppose the GOP position on renewable energy, which is absolutely appalling. Stewart might as well be working directly for Obama.
Any candidate who associates themselves with Dee Stewart, or for that matter the other green left consultant, Paul Shumaker, is a candidate who conservatives should oppose. Their association with these RINO consultants all be itself is enough to make that judgment.
At the convention, conservatives need to vote NO to Dee Stewart by voting NO to Craig Collins. We do not need another Stewart puppet as NCGOP chairman. Fetzer was bad enough.
And WOW, Carolyn Justice does seem to have seen the light since her Morgan days when she sees the Stewart problem and has the integrity to get herself untangled from it.
Raphael, this is one of the first times I’ve agreed with you 100%. And I TOLD you Carolyn was a true conservative and a great asset to the NC GOP. Sometimes y’all need to listen to people most familiar with someone and from their neck of the woods.
I was a big Chad Adams supporter and probably the lone one in my county delegation in 2009. I heard that Stewart brought in faux delegates to ensure Fetzer won. I’ve only met Dee once but over the years his name evokes the same shudder as Soros (or Rove).
So what the plan. How do the delegates fight Stewart and Collins.
Yea it was a sad raleigh convention when fetzer was elected
Cheating is indeed a concern. Sam Currin beat Jane Rouse by one executive committee vote to fill a vacancy for state chairman, after the deck was stacked by sending in College Republicans to impersonate missing 11th District Executive Committee members. (Is it a coincidence that Dee Stewart was once big in the College Republicans and was also close to Currin?). That is one reason for having to show an ID now to sign in for a state executive committee meeting.
The extremely bizarre voting system at conventions that has replaced the roll call of the counties offers a huge opportunity to cheat as it is not transparent. Indeed, two years ago, some strange things were noted in the vice chairman’s race that suggested some hanky panky might have been going on. The system also wastes a lot of convention time with its centralized count. That system badly needs to be junked and we need to go back to the much more transparent roll call of the counties.
Dee Stewart and Paul Shumaker steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from candidates and the NCGOP every election. Not making a reasonable living, stealing in the form of false invoices and kickbacks from vendors. Remember that those recently submitted “late” invoices the NCGOP submitted included one for Dee Stewart. Anyone who gives money to the NCGOP, the State House or State Senate caucus or any candidate who uses Shumaker or Stewart is just giving a contribution to corruption.
Sites like the Haymaker and Civitas are shining the light of truth on these and other crooks, but by the time they are exposed, the GOP will have lost control of the legislature and the Shu & Stew will have a nice nest egg built with the money of conservatives who should have known better.
Daoud needs to stand up at the convention and speak the truth. Don’t let them play games with Robert’s Rules of Order. Say exactly what is happening to the Party and our money. After that, if the delegates still choose Collins, we can mark the date as the day the NCGOP willing gave control over to the RINO’s and corrupt consultants like Stewart and Shumaker.
I am a delegate, and Harnett has my vote! He is by far the most qualified candidate.
AJ should come out against the Dee Stewart machine once and for all by endorsing Hasan Harnett for Chair.
Harnett has been an employee of the RNC, not exactly a hotbed of conservatives or responsive to the grassroots. What has he ever done but work for the RNC’s minority outreach program and run one Congressional campaign.
Sure, I will vote for him, if the only other choice is Collins, but Harnett’s ties to RNC bother me.
Daoud will be a much stronger candidate to beat the Stewart mafia.
I can understand your concern given that I consider the RNC to be the enemy. But is it possible he’s seen the light? Or like Pope Benedict’s stint as a Hitler Youth member, he was just young and needed a gig? After all, it was only yesterday people assumed Michelle Nix was of the New World Order because she kept getting photo-shopped with the liberal wing of the NCGOP.
Dee is scum. He was behind Patrick Mchenry, Kathy Harrington, Craig Collins and many other campaigns that were nothing but a smear jobs. He and the boys from long ago have been slowly gaining throughout the state, not for conservative principals but for shear power and money.
The secrets that many throughout the state know about what they have done in the past, both immorally and unethically will come to light. They can not hide forever. What all happened in the basement of the NCGOP in the 90’s through today will be told….
Too bad that those Civitas conservatives outted Dee as our guy. We would have liked to have kept that secret, and I am sure he would have, too. Whether Dee genuinely loves polar bears, or whether he just loves the big pile of Benjamins that we in the hard core environmental movement pay him is beside the point. Dee is our guy and is working for the hard core environmental cause. He really threw the GOP under the bus on that corporate welfare for our green energy buddies and conned a bunch of those Republican legislators into voting for what is actually the Democrat position. He really helped our cause. Too bad his efforts on the renewable energy mandate seem to be unraveling. Those nasty grassroots Republicans are fighting back. With Dee’s help, maybe we can still get President Obama’s vision of a green America to prevail.
I haven’t heard of how this Collins guy feels about polar bears, but it seems he is in Dee’s pocket, and Dee is in our pocket.
I did hear that the Collins guy was willing to go along with one of President Obama’s programs that is also important to fundamentally changing America, and that was executive amnesty. The GOP Congressman in Collins district, Patrick McHenry voted to fund President Obama’s executive amnesty, and Collins just sat on his hands and did not call him out on it. One would think that a GOP district chairman would call on his district Congressman to vote his party’s position instead of the President’s position, but good ole’ Collins played go-along-get-along. Since Collins sat on his hands on that one, I think he might just come around on polar bears, especially with Dee as his main man. Dee is a key to getting the Al Gore Republican agenda and the Obama Republican agenda moved forward.
I have to admit that when I first heard the name Dee Stewart, I though it was a chick, and I wondered if that chick liked to visit hotel rooms and give massages. Man was I disappointed when I found out this Dee was a dude. Ever since that Seattle incident, I have had trouble finding a discreet and cooperative chick to do hotel massages, but at least I came out better than Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he had the same problem. The media and the police know how important I am to the hard core environmental movement so they let me get away with things.
Leaving aside the particular concerns about Dee Stewart, having ANY consultant run an NCGOP state chairman’s campaign raises huge concerns.
The first issue is obvious. If a candidate for NCGOP chairman does not have the political skills and political savvy to run his own campaign for chairman, he probably does not have the political skills or political savvy to run the NCGOP as chairman.
Related to that is the fact that delegates have no way to assess the actual political skills and political savvy of a chairman candidate himself if all his moves are being choreographed by a consultant. Is the consultant going to sit at his right hand the whole time as chairman? Either answer to that question is bad for the NCGOP.
Then comes the old ”follow the money” issue. Of course, a candidate using a consultant is unlikely to actually be transparent enough to let delegates follow the money, but all of the possibilities of where the money trail may lead are disturbing. A consultant’s services in a prolonged statewide race like this will cost a pretty penny, so who is paying? Unless the candidate is wealthy (and that is not the case here), it will not be the candidate himself.
The first possibility is that it is some supporter or group of supporters. Such an undisclosed group is a real concern. They will have bought the chairman his election, and in a very real sense will ”own” him. There is no transparency as to who these people are. It could even be Dee Stewart’s green left friends.
The second possibility is that it could be the consultant himself doing it as a ”loss leader” knowing that if his candidate wins, the candidate will funnel him a lot of juicy contracts directly or indirectly from the NCGOP. That would be a massive conflict of interest which would create a very bad situation for the NCGOP.
All of the possible answers to a consultant running an NCGOP state chairman race are bad for the party, regardless of who the consultant is. Delegates should demand transparency, so they will at least know the answers, but are unlikely to get it. They should also avoid like the plague voting for any candidate for chairman who uses a consultant.
It would be good to amend the state GOP Plan of Organization to prohibit the NCGOP from spending any money, directly or indirectly, with a consultant who has run a successful NCGOP chairman’s campaign for the duration of that chairman’s term. But that would solve only one of the problems.
I would vote for that
Also i think elected officials should not be able to make endorsements in party races.
So yea a lot about this situation needs to be fix and repaired
I agree. Elected officials AND state party chairmen should not make endorsements in party races. If they persist, then county and district party members should make their own endorsements.
Yeah, yeah, the Plan of Organization: It makes good paper airplanes. That’s a good use for it until much need changes are made.
Aj needs to stop playing games and endorse Hasan Harnett. Aj is going tl split the vote and give Collins the win.
You have the dynamics all wrong. Two conservatives, each energizing their bases in different parts of the state will result in more conservatives attending the convention. That will increase the odds of preventing an establishment first ballot victory. On the second ballot, those two conservative groups of delegates unite to elect the stronger of the two who has made it into the runoff.