Cole: Stingy members ‘ought to be ashamed of themselves’

Rep. Tom Cole on Tuesday told the many Republican members who haven’t given to the GOP candidate in next week’s Mississippi special election that they “ought to be ashamed of themselves,” GOP sources said.

The Mississippi race is shaping up as an increasingly crucial psychological battle for a GOP conference that has already lost two seats this cycle after dropping 30 in the 2006 election, and the harsh admonition was the latest rallying cry from a GOP campaign arm that has repeatedly cited a lack of member enthusiasm and giving.

{mosads}House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told his colleagues earlier this year that they needed to get off their “dead asses” and raise money for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), and Senate GOP campaign chief John Ensign (Nev.) has also been critical.

Boehner and Cole (R-Okla.), the NRCC’s chairman, continued in that vein Tuesday at a closed-door House GOP meeting, asking members to focus on the Mississippi race just days after they suffered a big loss in former Rep. Richard Baker’s (R) conservative Louisiana district.

In another conservative district in Mississippi, the vast majority of members haven’t given to Southaven Mayor Greg Davis (R), even after he nearly lost to Democrat Travis Childers late last month.

The two will meet head-to-head in a runoff Tuesday, three weeks after Childers came within a few hundred votes of winning the race outright.

“Well, we lost [Louisiana], and it’s clear this election is about change,” Boehner told reporters after Tuesday’s meeting. “I wish we would have won, but we didn’t.”

He added that, rather than dwell on the failure in Louisiana, he preferred to look ahead to the “tough race” in Mississippi.

In the former, Rep. Don Cazayoux (D) defeated former state Rep. Woody Jenkins (R) 49-46 on Saturday.

Democrats already had taken over former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s (R-Ill.) district in March.

Very few GOP members gave to Jenkins despite the conservative nature of the Baton Rouge district, while Cazayoux raised about $160,000 from Democratic members.

In Mississippi, Democrats have given a similar amount to Childers, the Prentiss County Chancery Clerk. That’s about twice as much as their GOP colleagues have given to Davis.

GOP members have rallied a bit in recent days but have still only given about $80,000 to Davis’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission reports. About half of that total came just from Boehner, Cole and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), a regular contributor to his colleagues.

Only about two dozen rank-and-file GOPers have given, and most of them have given $1,000 or less.

On Tuesday, Cole also echoed his NRCC predecessor, Rep. Tom Reynolds (N.Y.), by warning that individual Republicans will lose if they don’t do what is necessary to win reelection.

Reynolds said after his party’s 30-seat loss in the 2006 election that some members didn’t take their races seriously until it was too late, and they wound up losing.

Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.) also defended the NRCC’s decision to spend money on the Louisiana special election despite the fact that, as many Republicans acknowledged early on, they had a flawed candidate.

The special election in Mississippi will continue to burden an NRCC that can’t afford to spend as much as Democrats.

At the end of March, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) held a $44.3 million-to-$7.2 million advantage in cash on hand. The DCCC has outspent the NRCC in Mississippi, $1.4 million to $990,000, as of Tuesday afternoon.

Childers led Davis in the special election on April 22, 49-46, leaving Davis some ground to make up.