John Weaver Sits Down With Texas Monthly

Nobody's perfect. Far from it.

But for our money, John Weaver is as good a political strategist as anyone we know/know of.

And we know/know of an awful lot of people.

So we direct budding Republican operatives to this piece on Weaver in the new issue of Texas Monthly.

In particular, these two graphs on the Republican Party:

Weaver’s flirtation with the Democrats was partly a reaction to the nasty turn Bush’s campaign took after McCain’s primary victory in New Hampshire, and he sees the Republican party’s current malaise as at least partly related to the divisive tone set by Bush and Rove in that election. “The chickens have come home to roost” is how he put it to me. “Their policies are all about politics. The government is out of step with the hopes and dreams of Americans. The party is at its nadir. The president has had Nixon numbers for three years. We can’t go on being the all-male, gated-community party. We now know who our twenty-seven percent is. Parties that oppose immigration end up on the dust heap of politics.”

Perhaps in all those years Weaver spent with McCain, the senator’s penchant for frankness rubbed off on his onetime strategist. Or perhaps it had always been Weaver driving the Straight Talk Express. Either way, his observations spared no one. “The party has lost its principles,” he told me. “We’ve had the DeLay and Mark Foley scandals. DeLay was a poster child for the hubris of our Republican leadership. He rewarded his K Street friends when the Republican party is supposed to be the party of Main Street. Spending is now the most since the Great Society, but without the heart. That’s a loser.” He shook his head. “We need to go through a wilderness. I have a bad sense we’ve just started.”

Straight. Talk.

Those two paragraphs are a small but good example of why GMP1 thinks that John Weaver is the f*cking man.

And why we hope like crazy that he jumps back into the campaign side of things in 2010 (and beyond).

The Republican Party needs him.