“Can’t anyone here play this game?” cried legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel, frustrated with the incompetence of his 1962 Amazin’ Mets. The Massachusetts Republican State Committee should be asking the same question—not because Jim Lyons is an inept chair but because Lyons is an inept culture warrior.
The GOP needs to “reimagine” the chairmanship not because of Lyons’ suicidal attack on Governor Charlie Baker but because Lyons is no good at his suicidal attack on Baker. And that means he is no good at his core mission, the greater glory of the Donald Trump wing of the Republican Party.
The national Republican Party that Lyons wishes to emulate stands for only two things: tax cuts for the rich and culture wars, and the tax bennies depends on culture war politics. Lyons is a radical right culture warrior to his bones, but he keeps screwing up the execution.
Look at your Globe, PoliticoMass, etc. etc. and what do you see? Democratic appointees of a Democratic Boston mayor (and now Secretary of Labor for a Democratic president) forced to resign from their school committee posts due to racial remarks. This follows the previous resignation of another Boston school committee person appointed by a Democratic mayor over that school committee member’s racial remarks. Two consecutive Boston School chairpersons forced into resignation over racial remarks.
Could the Democrats tee this up any better for an even minimally competent GOP chair to launch a culture wars attack? So what’s Chair Lyons up to? Defending himself against 29 of 30 Republican House members and others who want him to resign over his thumb sucking response to anti-gay bigotry expressed by state committee member Deborah Martell, who attacked a fellow gay GOP state committee member because he and his husband adopted children.
Oh yeah. The Democrats soft-lobbed this one up as well, with their Alex Morse controversy. But Lyons can’t execute on it.
Scot Lehigh details plenty of additional reasons why Lyons should go, including that the Massachusetts Republican Party is becoming a little tiny division of 1A Auto Parts. But Mr. Lehigh’s column is aimed at rational Republicans who might actually want to retain the governor’s office in 2022. This post is not for them.
No, this post is for the frothing culture warriors who actually think a Trumpified Massachusetts GOP will deliver the state back to the nineteenth century, or at least the 1950s. Your party is a culture wars party. How’s that going for ya?
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.]