The list of prominent Tennessee Republicans repudiating their own state party continues to grow this evening. Yesterday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) joined Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain in explicitly rejecting the TN Republican party’s tactics in attacking Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Sen. Bob Corker have condemned the message from their own party spokesman, Bill Hobbs. Meanwhile,  Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey and Republican Minority Leader Jason Mumpower don’t see what the big fuss is all about and believe the state party is doing a great job representing their values.
The inappropriate press release titled “Anti-Semites for Obama” was issued by TN Republican Party Spokesman Bill Hobbs on Monday. It included an image of Obama wearing a turban, referred to him repeatedly as “Barack Hussein Obama” and charged that Obama surrounds himself with anti-Semitic supporters, including Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. The release hammered a self-destructive wedge between Republican party moderates who support John McCain and the party’s bitter Christian conservative base, many of whom delivered Tennessee for Mike Huckabee in the Republican primary.
Sen. Alexander’s statement yesterday said Tennessee Republican Party Chair Robin Smith “is removing the release and the photo from the website.” Smith, however, spent the day defending the post in various media outlets and did not remove the release. Smith went so far as to refer reporters to Obama’s dead mother as to why Hobbs used Obama’s middle name.
WKRN blogger Adam Kleinheider gave Hobbs an extended opportunity today to explain why the press release was still on the state party website. Hobbs instead refuted Alexander’s statement claiming there was no agreement to remove the release. After seeking reaction from Sen. Alexander’s office, the release quickly disappeared from the state party website.
In a span of 24 hours, both Robin Smith and Bill Hobbs went from launching a widely condemned smear campaign against Barack Obama to bizarre backpedalling clarifications, open insubordination to senior party officials, and total message implosion under still more pressure from prominent state Republicans.
This isn’t the first online posting that has gotten Bill Hobbs into trouble. In 2006, Hobbs abruptly left his job at a Nashville-based Christian university after authoring an anti-Muslim post inviting readers to join him in denigrating Islam. Hobbs was then hired in October 2007 as the spokesman for the Tennessee Republican Party. Whether it was to continue waging a radically divisive agenda on behalf of state Republicans remains to be seen.
