That’s the message voiced, in various ways, by the four men running for the post of chairman of the state Republican Party. Here at the NC Coastal Conservative Conference in Wilmington, a debate is still going on between the four candidates: Chad Adams, Tom Fetzer, Marcus Kindley, and Bill Randall.
As longtime Locker Room readers know, two of the candidates have a background at JLF. Chad Adams is currently on leave, having served as JLF Vice President and Director of the Center for Local Innovation. Ironically, former Raleigh Mayor Tom Fetzer was the initial director of the Center for Local Innovation when we first created it back in 1999 as an outreach program for city and county officials across the state.
So both have held the same job at JLF, at different times. Now they are running the same job, at the state party.
During his remarks at the forum, Adams emphasized his previous political experience as a two-term commissioner in Lee County and the former head of that county’s Republican Party. He also said that as CLI director, he’s been in all 100 counties working with municipal and county officials on such issues as spending & taxes, Smart Growth, education, transportation, and performance management.
He said that before the GOP can recruit good candidates and raise sufficient funds to compete with the Democrats in North Carolina, it has to ?restore trust in the party? that has been squandered by poor GOP governance in Washington. He also calls for the use of strategic planning and new technologies to build a better turnout machine in each county.
Tom Fetzer, who served three terms as the mayor of Raleigh and later became a political consultant, said that ?leadership begins with listening.? As he has traveled the state campaigning for chairman, Fetzer reports that the Republicans he meets are angry, frustrated, but also motivated to compete effectively in 2010.
That means, he added, ?building bridges to conservative Democrats and independents,” because of the substantial difference in registration between Ds and Rs in North Carolina.
More on the other two candidates in a bit.
