I wouldn't doubt it :)
Here's a National Review piece from January 2003, may help shed a little more light on his special staus in the party.
Golden Possibilities
California is winnable for Republicans.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-steel011503.asp
an excerpt follows
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The defeat of the statewide ticket here was largely man-made. No one worked harder or had a better message than Bill Simon. Merely citing Bill Simon's inexperience and his chaotic, mistake-prone campaign staff only goes so far. Attention needs to be paid to the man-behind-the-curtains: Gerald L. Parsky.
Parsky is a liberal, ultra-wealthy Los Angeles investor. He's also President Bush's self-appointed man in California, a sort of White House California viceroy. He holds no formal title or party office and few Republicans know his name, but he is unarguably the single-most-powerful Republican in the state. He has the last word in federal judicial appointments in California, and harbors aspirations to be treasury secretary.
Seeds of the Election Day disaster were planted a year ago, when Parsky muscled through a restructuring of the state party that transferred executive authority from the elected chairman to an unelected operations committee controlled by himself — effectively severing ultimate control of the party from grassroots activists and giving it to a small oligarchy.
As party chairman, I voluntarily assented to the experiment on the strength of promises by Parsky that he would, in exchange, leverage his close relationship with the White House to raise at least $10 million for the party's political plan. Lacking a Republican governor or U.S. senator, California Republicans desperately need the help of a Republican White House to raise the huge sums necessary to be competitive in the fall election.
Thus began a string of broken promises and blockheaded decisions that significantly contributed to our losses this November. Parsky bestirred himself to raise only $3.5 million of the $10 million he originally pledged. The relative ease with which he accomplished that — that money was raised with just three fundraising events — left many party leaders wondering why he chose not to raise the additional millions that would have made the difference in some close races.
The promised stream of Cabinet officers and other high administration officials to raise funds proved to be less than a trickle. While Parsky did bring in Vice President Dick Cheney to headline two of his three fundraising events, and Karl Rove and Jack Oliver touched down for brief donor tour, Parsky was curiously unable to include a single fundraising opportunity on the itineraries of more than 100 visits to California by Cabinet officials during the last year.
At the same time, Parsky — who controlled party finances and expenditures — starved state-party operations, hoarding revenues in separate campaign accounts and refusing to fund vital campaign efforts until very late — too late — in the game.
This indifference and mismanagement bled into the Simon campaign. Parsky threatened to block funds for Simon's candidacy unless his campaign was put in the hands of Rob Lapsley — a long-time operative who had been in charge of Secretary of State Bill Jones's abysmal gubernatorial primary campaign.