I am a bit puzzled and frustrated with all the Republican campaigning for this primary that is next week! I think that over all the campaigns are being a bit short sighted.

Let’s take the Meg Whitman/Steve Poizner campaign. Some of the commercials I thought were just dumb. I kept waiting for the #1 reason not to vote for Poizner, could be he is the son of Satan;)? Those commercials just kept seeming to get sillier and sillier. Then of course, Whitman is really a Dem in Republican’s clothing according to Poizner. And do you know she has money? Imagine that, electing someone who ran a successful business and in return made a ton of money. California couldn’t survive a person like that;).I guess I am just burned out on Governor’s races in California because I know that any Republican that gets elected is only going to be some conservative. That is the nature of our state at this point. So I didn’t find the information in the “They are a bigger liberal” commercials all that shocking.

But what has really frustrated me is the involvement of the national level players. I have gotten “calls” from both Gingrich and Cheney this last week. Are they really sure that they want to pick junior horses and risk their political capitol at the primary level? What if Whitman loses the primary? Will the national Republican machine support which ever Republican wins the primary? Then, won’t that seem hypocritical? I think that the national involvement at this point is just terribly short sited. I think we want to win the election in November more than winning a primary, don’t we?

My 2 big fears through all this? First, is that the Democrats will use all the smear commercials against whomever wins the primary. But that is shadowed by my main concern. I am afraid that the national involvement, particularly for Whitman, will backfire huge if she loses. If they are successful in convincing a good sized percentage of Republicans that the other side is nothing but a rhino, those Republicans may be less than excited about voting at all. And that means they won’t vote in any race, not just the governor’s. I can say that NerdDad and I have said that we would rather Brown be elected than a horrible Republican that will do the same things as Brown but under the Republican moniker. At least then we could hope for conservative backlash next time. Now I am not saying that either Poizner or Whitman are that worst case scenario. But if that crossed our minds….Could the involvement of someone like Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich convince people that Poizner or Whitman is? So come election in November we may have a less than active Republican voter base.

What do you think? Am I over reacting?