The NWI Patriots, who were invited to join the GOP meeting last week as members of the Porter County Republican Facebook page, did attend and at least one author was quite upset with the way things progressed. Calling the local GOP, on the Road to NoWhere, and poking fun at plans for Lincoln Day Dinners and parade floats.
It was a disappointment but not a waste of time. We learned that the Porter County GOP has no official position on the RTA referendum and it doesn’t consider the institution of a governmental body, to be composed of unelected appointees with the authority to impose additional income taxes, to be a political issue. Its committee members have no clue about the most pressing local issue facing County residents, they say. Indeed, it has no official guiding principles that it uses to determine its positions on issues, a question that was asked repeatedly in different forms but remained unanswered. A question for the next time: does the Porter County GOP have an opinion on not having an opinion? Perhaps we’ll get an answer to that. We learned that infighting and juvenile outbursts are no respecters of political label.
Sweet Liberty, a brand new blog took the second attack with the more direct approach, Porter County GOP in shambles.
Now we have some regular readers and authors here on this site who I'm sure will provide some background and perhaps even another version of the story. But my own opinion is that the activists may have missed the entire point of being invited in the first place. The GOP does not have a position on this referendum, at least that's the reports from the meeting, but they did go out of their way to invite activists who they knew were fighting it. Inclusive engagement would seem worthy of some applaud.
The RTA referendum will fail miserably, and frankly most people in Porter County don't even know about it, and won't be voting. Watch for less than 10% voter turnout, an obvious sign that citizens just don't care right now ... they'd much prefer to see the economy start to claw its way back and employers start hiring again.
