May 20, 2009 06:00 PM UTC

Penry's First Direct Attack On McInnis

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• by: Colorado Pols

If you were wondering when all-but-declared GOP gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry was going to stop letting surrogates do the dirty work and take on primary opponent Scott McInnis directly, you can stop wondering.



Can’t see the audio player? Click here.

This audio clip, forwarded to us, is from Penry’s remarks last Thursday at the Colorado Union of Taxpayers’ legislative wrapup session. It’s a little muffled, so here’s a transcription:

…It’s also not going to happen quickly. If you look at the numbers they are dramatic, what’s happened in the last two cycles. We’ve dug ourselves a deep hole, and the reality is on a national level it’s probably going to be a couple of cycles before we can dig out.

The final thing I would say though, is with that, there was a lot of–it forced people to do some soul searching, and to acknowledge the error of our ways. I saw a–somebody sent me an email where, it’s like, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous, we have to admit we made errors over the span of the last decade–not only admit it to ourselves but to come clean with the public. You know the fact that in 1992 there was 4,000 earmarks and then by, you know, 2004 the Republicans in Congress passed a budget with 15,000 earmarks? We need to say that was a mistake. [Pols emphasis]

Yes we don’t like Obama’s trillions of dollars in deficits but ours were just as wrong. Now going forward, here’s where we want to go. Um, but that’s going to take time because the brand isn’t, isn’t fixed quickly.

The key thing to note here are the dates Penry refers to–1992 and 2004, and the enormous growth in earmarks that occured during this period. Passed, as Penry is clear to say, by “the Republicans in Congress.”

Scott McInnis was elected to Congress in 1992 and retired in 2004.

This isn’t the first time Penry has at least obliquely attacked McInnis–our readers will recall in early April when Penry laid into Democrats for legislative maneuvers “reminiscent of what the Republicans did in Washington…Tom DeLay tactics.”

But this is the first time we know of that Penry has invoked circumstances that can only apply to McInnis. If he was merely talking about the ‘Republicans in Congress,’ he would have mentioned that they didn’t take power until 1994. This is Penry very intelligently turning his inexperience into an asset, divorcing himself (rhetorically anyway) from the GOP’s unseemly past–and it’s a narrative that could seriously hurt McInnis with the disaffected Republican base.