A TALE OF TWO JIMS

The Watauga County Republican Party needed to find a new face for itself, and it did last Saturday. It elected Dr. James Goff, a history prof at ASU, as its new chair. Goff is author of "Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel," published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002. The introductory chapter of the book is on-line here on the UNC website and is all the more interesting for putting the people I grew up among at the very center of U.S. history. These were and are people who never thought they might be important, never suspected that their religious traditions actually defined American democracy, but their music soared. Cotton field sinners and saints alike might have guffawed at the thought that what they thought and how they sang was important, but there they are in Goff's book, and he's done a good job with them.

Dr. Goff's other current distinction is that he co-hosts "The Right Side" with Jim Hastings on WATA on Wednesday mornings, which is not exactly a new face for the Republican Party. Quite the contrary, "The Right Side" is the old face, the angry face, the downright scowling face, the I'm-agin-it-if-I-didn't-think-of-it-first visage, the rich man's frowning mug -- mad about taxes, mad about new schools because they come with taxes, mad about poor people sucking at the rich man's teat all day long and all night long and in between too, mad about guvmint because it runs on taxes and persecutes the successful and even prosecutes the successful for not paying enough taxes, all of which means guvmint and Democrats need to go straight to hell and will go straight to hell, too, and TOGETHER, since guvmint IS Democrats, the godless, communist, socialist, gay, tree-huggin' bunch of 'em!

THAT face of the Republican Party.

Dr. Goff is the quieter, nicer counterpart to the west wind that blows perpetually hot out of Jim Hastings, who was himself both the local Republican Party chair and the state of North Carolina Republican Party chair, until a scandal about unpaid taxes forced his resignation from the latter office.

So the question naturally presents itself about this "new face" of the Republican Party. Does an independent mind come with that face, and Gospel instincts, or is the new face really just a pleasant mask to hide what has not and will not change at all, for if "The Right Side" is any indication of trends in the local Republican Party, it's in fact in the process of contorting itself into something uglier, angrier, and more extreme than we've previously seen.

Some have taken Mr. Hastings' recent attacks on "socialist Boone" and on Mayor Loretta Clawson, along with the revelations of his hand in all that trumped up Templeton tempest (mentioned in Jason Reagan's recent editorial in the Watauga Democrat), as proof positive that the Republican Party, rather than trending toward the sunny side of the street, is prepared rather to root deeper into the dark of the shade.

In between singing gospel songs, my mother liked to warn me that I would be known for the company I kept. Wasn't any way out of that. She would know what I was becoming by the friends I made, by the pack I ran with.

It's my reasonable expectation that that old doctrine still holds true. We shall see who's actually running the Watauga County Republican Party soon enough, and what face it will show us.