Last summer, a number of changes hit the leadership of the Massachusetts Republican Party.
In August, executive director Brian Dodge resigned for a lobbyist position in the DC area. He watched his party’s presence on Beacon Hill shrink to less than 10 percent. Within a decade the remarkable gains initiated by Bill Weld’s election were squandered by pandering to the religious right.
Anybody who reads the newspapers knows that such pandering is political suicide in Massachusetts. But it pays in Washington. It did for Dodge; and Romney’s certainly betting on it.
A month later, the party leadership tapped Robert Willington to fill Dodge’s shoes. He brings youthful enthusiasm, and much-needed Internet savvy to Merrimack Street. Less promising, though, is the fact that Willington cut his teeth on the (fortunately) unsuccessful VoteOnMarriage campaign.
Willington's selection is troubling because he fought to enshrine, in our opinion, a wrong-headed concept of civil marriage. Willington is young and sharp, but if he wastes political capital on right-wing social policies he'll do as well at the helm of the MassGOP as his immediate predecessor did.
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