GOP candidates’ feud could imperil race against Reid

By Michael Mishak

Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010 | 2 a.m.

So much for the civility.

Despite pledging to run positive campaigns, the two leading Republicans fighting for the chance to take on Sen. Harry Reid in November have turned their guns on each other, taking shots in a back-and-forth that portends an ugly primary season.

Danny Tarkanian, a lawyer and former UNLV basketball star, has launched a series of attacks on Sue Lowden, a former state senator and one-time chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party, in what’s shaping up as a fight for the title of true conservative.

She has responded in kind.

Political observers say the sniping could hurt the eventual Republican nominee because it represents the type of deep partisanship and political maneuvering that turns off independents, a critical bloc of voters that could determine the outcome of the general election.

Moreover, the fighting has a clear political beneficiary: Reid. While the Senate majority leader faces low approval ratings and trails in public opinion polls, a damaged and vulnerable Republican nominee could temper the political atmosphere.

As David Damore, a UNLV political scientist, put it: “This has to be sweet music to Harry Reid’s ears.”

This week, Tarkanian pounced on Lowden for comments she made to the Nevada Appeal on the bank bailouts.

“It’s easy to say, ‘No, I wouldn’t have voted for it,’ ” she told the newspaper. “But people were panicked, we were facing collapse — that’s what they were saying. It’s easy to say from a distance, ‘I would have voted no,’ but I can’t do that.”

Tarkanian told supporters in an e-mail Monday that the remarks were a “defining moment” in the campaign, arguing that Lowden’s apparent support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program makes her Reid’s ally. He said he would have opposed the bailout, which he blamed for fostering “the culture of socialization of America.”

Tarkanian’s campaign manager, Brian Seitchik, called Lowden “a typical politician with no core beliefs who will end up going along with the establishment crowd when she gets to Washington, D.C.”

Robert Uithoven, Lowden’s campaign manager, fired back Tuesday, saying the attacks were the mark of “a desperate candidate who is trying to energize a campaign that may need some added energy.” He said Tarkanian was twisting Lowden’s words and misleading voters.

“All she said is it’s easy for people to (play) Monday morning quarterback (for) votes,” Uithoven said. “It’s easy for him and others to say they would have voted no. But Sue Lowden is not willing to say it was an easy vote for (Congress).”

Pressed on the issue, Uithoven noted that the bank bailout was devised and proposed by the Bush administration and approved by some of the Senate’s most conservative lawmakers, including Sens. John Ensign of Nevada and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

In hindsight, he said TARP was bad legislation but that Lowden is focused on the future. She supports an amendment by Sen. John Thune that would require unspent TARP funds be returned to the U.S. Treasury to help pay off the national debt.

In some ways, it’s ironic that Lowden has been put back on her heels over the bank bailout. A consensus of mainstream economists across the spectrum says the injection of capital into major financial institutions prevented the collapse of the financial system.

Gary Becker, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize and economist at the famously libertarian, free market-oriented University of Chicago, recently told New Yorker writer John Cassidy that the federal government was right to extend trillions of dollars to frozen credit markets through the Federal Reserve and in bailing out the big banks.

“I don’t accept the view that in this crisis we should just have let everything fall where it may,” he told Cassidy. “Yeah, the economy would have picked itself up, but it would have been a much more severe recession.”

Nevertheless, both candidates are working through the political calculus of the Republican primary. The bailout is deeply unpopular with conservatives and the anti-government Tea Party movement that has energized the GOP here and elsewhere. The candidates face the tough — and inevitable — challenge of appealing to the base in the primary and emerging as an attractive alternative to the wider public, said Eric Herzik, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno.

“This type of infighting is the very thing that Republicans need to avoid because it leaves hard feelings within the party and it turns off people who are out of the party but looking for a Harry Reid alternative,” Herzik said. “If the candidates go too far to the right, then how do they make the bridge back to nonpartisans in the general election? Republicans have to seal that deal with the centrist voter.”

Both candidates are also competing for the endorsement of the Club for Growth, a conservative group that played an outsize role in the 2006 race for Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District. Tarkanian and Lowden have signed the group’s pledge to repeal any federal health care legislation.

Bob List, a former Nevada governor and Republican National committeeman, said the barbs being aimed at fellow Republicans are inevitable. “The fact is, they both want to win ... They put their political lives on the line. To get into the finals, they have to emerge winners from the primary.”

List said there’s “going to be a certain amount of damage. A certain amount of healing will be required after the primary.”

He noted that with the June primary, rather than August or September as in prior years, there will be more time for Republicans to unite behind a single candidate before November’s primary.

But the earlier primary also benefits Reid. The candidate who emerges in June will have to endure additional months of being pummeled by Reid’s campaign war chest. His advisers have pledged to “vaporize” whoever emerges from the primary.

Sun reporters J. Patrick Coolican and David McGrath Schwartz contributed to this story.