Bud Kennedy: Party purity is a losing ticket for GOP

By BUD KENNEDY

bud@star-telegram.com

Some local Tea Party protesters want to do for local Republicans what their allies have done for upstate New York.

In other words, ruin the Republicans.

Four of the strongest local Republican incumbents — U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley and state Reps. Charlie Geren and Vicki Truitt — are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party flank of the party, where former Denton County U.S. Rep. Dick Armey and celebrity author Sarah Palin are leading libertarian conservatives in a political crazy quilt of directions.

When hard-liners backed a conservative third-party outsider instead of a moderate local Republican in a New York congressional special election this week, something happened that hasn’t happened in that upstate New York district since before the Civil War:

The Democrat won.

On the same day, a moderate businessman was knocked out of the runoff for mayor of Houston. Architect Peter Brown lost moderate and conservative support to a Tea Party activist who called himself the "true conservative." Both lost.

There is nothing new about the math: You can’t get to 50 percent by dividing conservatives away from moderates or by dividing Republican voters.

Yet a pastor from televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s church is among local challengers who would do just that.

Richard Clough of Eagle Mountain International Church near Newark is challenging Whitley for county judge in the March 2010 election and plans to make a very public entry into politics Tuesday.

Clough said Thursday that he plans to address the Fort Worth City Council and "present another side of the issue" of homosexuality as the council considers extending current rules to prevent discrimination against anyone based on his or her expression of gender.

I guess it’s only a coincidence that after a four-month investigation into the badly botched police raid at a tiny gay bar, the Rainbow Lounge, Clough is suddenly speaking up, now that he’s campaigning.

His Web site says "No Toll Roads" and calls for "improving relations with churches."

He declined to comment Thursday.

Whitley didn’t.

"If he had an objection to toll roads, he could have come to transportation council meetings, highway meetings, regional meetings — we’ve had plenty of public events, and I’ve never seen him," Whitley said.

Whitley ran unopposed in 2006.

But Republicans won other seats with as little as 53 percent of the vote.

"I think some people just want everybody who’s in office gone," Whitley said. "They want to start all over."

Tarrant County Republicans don’t need to start all over.

Bud Kennedy’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538 Twitter@budkennedy

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