It’s a great week when you get two entries for the playbook.
On Tuesday, we had The Invite.
Today we have The Gift.
In politics, The Gift occurs when a party or a candidate through their own behavior provides an opponent with an issue, an opportunity or an advantage they would otherwise not have.
The Jeff Frederick Show has been, without a doubt, the top-rated and most consistently entertaining intraparty drama in Virginia Politics this decade.
We had the insurgency in which he unseated long-time GOP stalwart and former Lieutenant Governor John Hager as state party chair.
There was the scathing letter Amy Frederick wrote Speaker Bill Howell for his temerity in trying to assist Hager keep his position.
Last fall, we had the rebuke from John McCain in the middle of the presidential campaign when Frederick compared Barack Obama to Osama Bin Laden.
More recently, Walter Curt resigned as party finance chair, stating that RPV was simply “dysfunctional.”
And just when the Democrats were about to topple the show from its perch atop the ratings with Is He Really a Virginian: Should Terry McAuliffe Be Our Nominee? the GOP has responded by launching a new minseries– Will He Stay or Will He Go?
On one side, we have the vast majority of GOP Central Committee members who have signed a letter informing Frederick they will take a vote on his removal as party head at their April meeting.
They have been joined by the GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell who expressed his support yesterday for the “grassroots effort” to install more effective leadership at Party Central during the course of the upcoming campaign.
But Frederick issued a statement and took action yesterday making it clear that if a coup occurs, it won’t be bloodless.
He asserted that he would not resign. He claimed to have enough votes on the party’s central committee to keep his impeachers from getting to the 75% threshhold that’s required to remove him.
GOP blogs commented that House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith was mustering support on Frederick’s behalf.
And on the day the coup became public, Frederick announced that David Rensin, who has given almost $2 million dollars to Republican and GOP causes in the past decade, had agreed to become finance chair for the RPV.
Forget about that going quietly stuff!
For the Democrats, this show is the gift that keeps on giving.
They are all hoping that Frederick’s opponents come one vote shy of garnering the necessary 75% majority to remove him at the RPV’s Central Committee’s spring meeting in April.
Just maybe, the Democrats are thinking, we’ll get lucky and they’ll air a summer rerun.
If Jeff Frederick were a careful student of past conservative leaders like Dick Obenshain, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and so many others, he would know that one trait they shared was to put their Party first, their personal ambitions second. When over 60% of the State Central Committee and the Party’s sole candidate for Governor believe a change in leadership is needed, the path for Del. Frederick should be clear. He can only serve his Party by resigning. Otherwise, regardless of his rhetoric, his clinging to office under these circumstances risks serious injury to an already battered Virginia GOP. Del. Frederick serves his Party only by recognizing that his continuation in office guarantees a fractured and splintered Party limping into the critical election battles of the Fall. He should resign.