The Club for Growth, a conservative political watchdog group, is now taking aim at U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., because Walden had the temerity recently to criticize President Obama’s plans to overhaul the government’s “entitlement” programs.
They’re looking at finding a suitable GOP primary opponent to try to knock off their fellow conservative who’s been in Congress since 1999.
This is going to be fun to watch.
I know a little about Walden and about the Second Congressional District he represents in the U.S. House of Representatives. He serves folks in my home state of Oregon, where I was born, raised and where my journalism career began.
My favorite quote in the story, published by The Hill, comes from Club for Growth president Chris Chocola: “We always knew Greg Walden had a liberal record, but he really cemented it with his public opposition to even modest entitlement reform.”
Liberal record? Greg Walden?
Walden served from 1981 until 1987 as press secretary to then-U.S. Rep. Denny Smith, himself a Ronald Reagan revolutionary who knocked off Democratic House Ways and Means Chairman Al Ullman in one of 1980’s more stunning upsets. I was editor of a suburban daily newspaper just south of Portland at the time and I had plenty of interaction with Walden. He spoke eloquently in support of his boss’s conservative record.
Walden then was elected in his own right to the House in 1998 – long after I had left Oregon for Texas. And his district, the sprawling Second, is one of the most conservative districts in the country. It ranges far across the eastern two-thirds of Oregon, from the Cascade Range to the Idaho border. Its major constituency comprises people who work the land, wheat farmers and cattle ranchers who are just about as conservative as anyone in America. Indeed, there’s more than a tinge of John Bircherism out there on the high plateau.
I remember Walden as a capable press aide and a straight shooter. He has compiled a solidly conservative voting record in Congress, just as his former mentor, Smith, did.
OK, so he had some unkind things to say about Social Security reform. House Speaker John Boehner said he has “had some conversation” with Walden about the remarks. But now we have this right-wing fringe outfit seeking actually to oust one of its own because of those remarks?
This quest for ideological purity is utter nonsense.