Talk about drawing the short straw

As best I can remember, the Oregon GOP hasn't won a statewide race in Oregon since Gordon Smith's booby-prize re-election in 2002 (not counting Greg Walden's seat in OR CD2, where he will apparently continue to serve until god one day takes him home, after which the citizens of CD2 will probably re-elect him another time or two, just to make the point).

But OR GOP has a new state chair -- the fifth one in ten years. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Suzanne Gallagher:

The owner of an interior design business, Gallagher said she wouldn’t try to change the party’s conservative stance on issues but added that she would “develop target marketing to reach a variety of demographic groups.”

The strategic analysis is trickling down from the national GOP leadership: People are avoiding the Republicans in droves not because their policies are toxic, but rather because Republicans haven't found a way to get their message out properly -- to hispanics, blacks, women, gays, working people of all colors and gender, and so on, all of whom presumably will find GOP policies less toxic if they learn even more about their toxicity. (One is reminded of Charlie Pierce's observation that the better people got to know Mitt Romney in 2012, the more they disliked him.) So, if nothing else, it's a favorable wind for Oregon Dems in 2014.

But wait -- there's more!

In particular, she said she wanted to restore the “trust and confidence of women voters” in the GOP, in part by recruiting more women to run for the Legislature. Gallagher, 65, said she learned how to talk to a wide variety of voters when she ran two losing races for the House and Senate in predominately Democratic districts.

She honed her talking-to-voters skills in two losing races. I'm just . . . I'm just . . . wow.

Just wow.

Honestly, is it possible that John Lee, Jr., and Art Robinson, the other two candidates for the top GOP slot in Oregon, just took a dive rather than be the face of the Oregon Republicans for the next two years?