It makes sense. Having presided over the decline of the Republican party in Texas, she has the experience to take her expertise to the national level. The source is Marc Ambinder’s generally excellent blog for the Atlantic Monthly. Here is the complete text: More dispatches from the coming battle for control of the Republican Party, which is itself the first of many long engagements on the march back to coherence. As always, if John McCain wins the election, he’ll appoint his own RNC chairman, but the party will still go to war. ** Katon Dawson, the South Carolina Republican Party chairman, will visit Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting of conservative activists. He’ll also make the rounds of conservative opinion leaders. ** Tina Benkiser, the chair of the Texas Republican Party and an activist who played a key role in her state party’s conservatization five years ago, is beginning to make phone calls. She might be interested in the race. She’s identified with the Christian Right, which may be a problem for the some of the party’s establishment/Northeastern members, but she’s very capable and well regarded. Ambinder bills his web site as a “reported blog.” Uh, Marc, you might want to check out that bit about “very capable and well regarded” with some of the R operatives down here. And while we’re on the subject, the Texas Republican party has been “conservatized” for a lot longer than five years. Back in 1996 the religious right tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison from being a delegate to the Republican National Convention in San Diego and succeeded in forcing then-governor George W. Bush to share the chairmanship of the delegation with one of their own. Karen Hughes’ reaction was, “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.”