Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

In Colorado’s 5th Congressional District, we’re going to see a near-repeat of the interesting (and disappointing) Republican primary of two years ago when Doug Lamborn won the race by lying and cheating, and with the endorsement of one of my favorite groups, the Club for Growth, whom I have excoriated repeatedly for making the worst decision in their existence.

Anyone who had worked with Lamborn knew that he was conservative, but that was the only good thing they (assuming they were conservatives) could say about him. Beyond that, he was known as one of the least hard-working members of the state legislature and as a petulant social conservative crusader who would oppose bills he should have supported if the sponsor had not gone along with him on some anti-abortion measure, for example. He is unfit to be a congressman and has proven since then that he is an embarrassment to the district, such as by leaving threatening voice mails for constituents who had written an unfavorable letter to the editor about him.

The best candidate for the job, the candidate who lost to Lamborn by fewer than 900 votes out of nearly 55,000 votes cast, is Jeff Crank, who is challenging Lamborn again in 2008. The other challenger in the race is Air Force Major General Bentley Rayburn who came in a fairly distant third in 2006. There were three other challengers in 2006 and it is safe to conclude that if any of them had not been in the race (including Rayburn), Jeff Crank would currently be the congressman for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District. Indeed, even after Lamborn’s time in office so far, Crank has more experience dealing with Congress, it’s committees, and the legislative process than Lamborn has.

I have met General Rayburn and have communicated with him by email more than once. As a son of two military parents, I have great respect for his accomplishments in his military career. But his actions in this campaign are a tremendous disappointment. His recent letter posted on his web page (note: the prior link is for an archived web page since I presume the page will change) shows all that is wrong with Rayburn’s campaign, and why voters in the 5th should leave him out of their calculations.

In his letter, General Rayburn says:
• he will petition on to the ballot instead of going through the assembly process
• “two of the (other) campaigns” have used negative tactics
• his effort is “about building our country, our state, and our party.”

Each of these represents Rayburn either lying or demonstrating that he doesn’t understand politics well enough to be a credible candidate.

Rayburn is not petitioning on because, as he claims, he wants to “run a different campaign.” No, it is because he knows that if he went through the assembly he stands a real chance of not getting enough delegates to be put on the ballot. On one hand, he could attempt to argue that as a political outsider, an assembly is somehow biased against him. On the other hand, it’s not clear that someone who is such an outsider (including not owning a home in the district) that he couldn’t get on the ballot through the assembly should even be running.

Rayburn’s claim that both of his competitors have used negative tactics is simply a lie. In reality, all of the negative tactics have come from Doug Lamborn and his henchmen, the Hotaling brothers who I believe violated campaign finance laws in 2006; I just hope someone comes along and proves it. If Rayburn thinks anything Jeff Crank has done is a negative tactic then Rayburn is too thin-skinned to be in office anyway, although I defy Rayburn to give evidence of a tactic that a majority of any size sample of unbiased observers would call negative. What Rayburn is doing is trying to lump Crank in with Lamborn as “one of those typical negative politicians” and casting himself as the fresh non-politician politician. I believe voters, especially primary voters, are far more aware of the truth of the situation, namely that Crank has run positive campaigns and that Rayburn is little more than a spoiler.

Which brings me to the third point: the claim that Rayburn’s campaign is aimed at building the party. Few primaries have been as divisive as the 5th’s last GOP primary. The wrong man won because everyone else split the rest of the vote. (Lamborn won the primary with less than 27% of the votes cast!) Rayburn has since told people that he would not be the cause of Lamborn’s re-election (i.e. that he would drop out of the race if he felt he didn’t have enough support to win.) but his efforts so far are more likely to lead to that than to any other outcome. If that happens, Rayburn will have done further real damage to the party rather than building it. The fact that he’s willing to do that is yet another argument for his not being suitable for this office. It’s possible that Rayburn believes he has enough support to win, and he did raise more money than either of the other two candidates in the last quarter, though more than a quarter of that money came from out of state. On the other hand, his refusal to go through the assembly process shows that he knows, at least at that level, he can’t win…can’t even get close.

Bentley Rayburn is obviously a good military officer, and I believe he’s a good man. Unfortunately, he is compromising not only his integrity but also the future of the area that he now (apparently) calls home by running a campaign he shouldn’t be, rationalizing his decisions with a combination of self-deception and misleading the rest of us about his campaign strategy, and simply lying about Jeff Crank.

In 2006, retiring Congressman Joel Hefley called the Lamborn campaign "one of the sleaziest, most dishonest campaigns I've seen in a long time.” Rayburn should take care not to come in a close second. General Rayburn could have a political future in Colorado, but his actions in the past months argue against his being a good choice, now or later.