Reorganization:
California’s GOP Would it professionalize the state Party?
Or submerge it? He controls no candidates, campaigns, or GOP office holders, but the CRP chairman is blamed for years of turmoil and too defeats. Will a state Party overhaul cure GOP woes? Or merely end grass roots’ last claim to power?California Political Review.
Every liberal from George Christopher and William Penn Patrick to George Skelton and Brooks Firestone say political reality demands that Republicans drop conservative principles if they want to win. Conservative reluctance to compromise drives away voters they say; those who won’t see this are fools not competent to carry out the Party’s essential tasks. They imply that Bush’s defeat here last year and earlier losses to Gray Davis and legislative Democrats all trace to this cause.
Now Gerald Parsky steps forward to say, one, that the GOP must become more “inclusive” — which no one disputes, until that is defined to mean forgetting about the right to life and the Second Amendment and, more broadly, adopting a Wilsonite flexibility toward compromise on every question — and, two, that it must “professionalize” — which, in turn, is opposed only when defined as replacing principled conservatives with people whose first passion is political campaign technology — a charitable way to describe a willingness to do or say anything that seems expedient at any given moment. Understanding last year’s (and earlier) Republican failure in California requires a more realistic evaluation of two basic questions: first, what was done wrong in 2000? and, second, who did it?
Ronald Reagan won elections. He did not fly from appeals to broad principle, nor did he drop those principles when it came to details and execution (except now and then on judges and taxes, which always brought political disaster). He launched his political career in 1964 by putting the real issue of our politics in unmistakable terms:
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to man’s age-old dream — the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
Reagan’s famous optimism about the good is here, but so is something rarely heard from later Republicans: a willingness to describe the evil alternative and to point directly to its source: anti-freedom liberalism. George W. Bush won the White House in 2000 because a bare minimum of Americans understood viscerally that the issue was this same essential moral question and that the evil answer to it was represented by Bill Clinton’s broad moral depravity, an answer Al Gore appeared ready to carry forward. While no one thought Gore shared Clinton’s infantile inability to control his gluttonous sexual appetite, he couldn’t seem to avoid telling even stupid, unnecessary lies in public. That convinced enough people they were voting on Clinton II and that the moral alternative, the choice to move up rather than down, was Bush (which, by the way, is why the last-minute pre-election disclosure of Bush’s quarter-century-old drunk driving arrest damaged him).
Bush’s California Campaign: The Steinberg Analysis
B Reagan did not just rely on voters’ visceral sense that his was the moral course. He regularly, repeatedly, and in detail explained how the issue played out in the everyday lives of real people. The Bush campaign in California could have done the same, employing high-profile education and property tax controversies to tap into key voting blocks, but did not do so.
Unlike Bob Dole four years earlier who never had a chance here, W. started out competitive in California. Respected pollster and campaign strategist Arnold Steinberg reported July 6, 2000, on National Review Online that “the new Steinberg survey ... places Bush at 37 percent and Gore at 40 percent among registered voters” with Bush enjoying “a clear lead over Gore among independent voters .... Bush wins among homeowners, loses decisively among renters. Bush would benefit from a strong campaign opposing Gray Davis’s measure to raise local property taxes for schools.”
This last point referred to the November ballot’s Proposition 39, essentially a second try to pass Proposition 26 with the slight refinement that the vote required to pass bonds would be 55 percent rather than 26’s simple majority. Bush’s decision not to talk about “specific initiatives on ballots” eliminated this opportunity to establish a clear connection in voters’ minds linking Bush’s appeal to broad conservative principles with a concrete, on-my-front-porch concern facing real people. It could have maximized turnout among pro-Bush homeowners and possibly even mobilized the Proposition 13 coalition, moving campaign momentum strongly in Bush’s direction. It never happened.
September 25, 2000, the Los Angeles Times, remarkably, all but endorsed Bush over Gore in a lead editorial — “Definite Choices on Schools” — which questioned the cost of Gore’s “cradle-to-grave” program (“an astonishing $115 billion”) while crediting Bush for his “tenure as an ‘education governor’” with a “more real- world feel for education.” It concluded that “Bush’s leadership quotient in education is more impressive than that of Gore.” The next day, Steinberg commented that “With this editorial, George Bush has quintessential third-party validation, and not just in California, where the LA Times’ words should be enshrined, immediately, in paid issues advertising. Indeed, this editorial could be a turning point in a national campaign where Gore aims to reduce Bush’s education policy to a caricature .... The Bush campaign needs to drop its beltway formulas and canned advertising and seize the moment, here and everywhere else.”
Judging by Steinberg’s running NR Online commentary throughout the campaign, the Bush effort never followed this advice, on this or other issues. A month after the Times editorial appeared, Steinberg told how GOP presidential campaigns handle funds: “Contributions from wealthy Californians are sent back to Washington where a portion never again leaves the beltway. The balance, admittedly still quite large, is returned (with strings) to California.” Steinberg mentioned this process in relation to a campaign opportunity presented by LA Mayor Dick Riordan’s heartfelt endorsement of Bush as the candidate who “understands what’s needed in education” and “who is not divisive.” “[Riordan’s] sincere message,” Steinberg wrote, “could resonate in television and radio commercials that connect with women voters. No wonder Bush/ Cheney California Chairman Gerry Parsky has promised, finally if belatedly, to use Riordan in advertisements in the state.
But can Parsky deliver? It’s hard to imagine the Washington folks creating an effective spot with Riordan looking directly into the camera and dramatically telling it like it is. Recycled Bush/RNC Victory 2000 television advertising here has used voice-over with graphics, rather than people saying something. Inexplicably, there’s been no radio.”
The Bush campaign’s generic, impersonal advertising became a Steinberg theme, which he summarized in an election day commentary: “millions were spent here ... on recycled ads with limited relevance for California, less impact on its voters. Obviously, California needed television spots with real people, with the right message, to reach targeted constituencies. And serious mail, not fluff.” The next day, he wrote that “for once, California was not a net exporter of campaign dollars.
But, as reported, the RNC squandered the money here on formula beltway-produced television advertising lacking any production values. The RNC actually refused polling data that showed the ads to be ineffectual. Similarly, millions of dollars were spent on mailings that failed to target women, independent voters, and other key groups with messages that matter. Nor was there an aggressive surrogate program or earned-media effort, let alone, for example, well-placed op-eds regularly spinning the Bush message .... True to form, Washington insiders now will say California is not winnable. We know better.” [emphasis added]
In late November, in a final salvo, Steinberg wrote that “Historically, the RNC has raised money effectively but spend it ineffectively, including legally laundering money through the California Republican Party and other state parties to favored beltway vendors outflanked by more competent Democrat strategists.... Thus, even a respected strategist like California Bush campaign chair, state Sen. Jim Brulte, had one hand, maybe both, tied behind his back.” [emphasis added]
The 2000 campaign included lots more incompetence damaging to Bush: Silicon Valley political neophyte Tim Draper’s disastrous $30 million school “voucher” campaign that drove up teacher (i.e., Gore voter) turnout — $30 million that could have elected several pro-educational choice GOP legislators; Republican liberal Tom Campbell’s nearly invisible U.S. Senate campaign with, among its few memorable moments, a TV spot Steinberg described as featuring “Campbell, looking like he’s on something, [attacking] ‘Dianne’ for being too hard-line on drugs”; business billionaires, with Pete Wilson serving as cheerleader, lavishly funding Proposition 39, the initiative to extract hundreds of thousands of dollars from property owners of modest means — great for Bush’s conservative Republican base, as was the specter of heavy business spending being diverted from Republican to Democrat legislative candidates, the corporate types having entered their best rats-jumping-ship mode.
But now the scalping knives are out for the CRP power structure because, we are told, last year’s chairman, no longer around, made mistakes hiring staff and acted foolishly over a slate mailing regarding an initiative that lost anyway. Who ran Victory 2000? Who decided Bush would take no position on Proposition 39? Who planned the major paid and earned media campaign for Bush in California? Who ignored “polling data that showed the Bush ads to be ineffectual” and “favored beltway vendors outflanked by more competent Democrat strategists”? Whose incompetence and willingness to place self-interest above the good of the candidate drove up Democrat turn-out and demoralized the GOP rank-and-file, damaging Bush here?
Who? The Republican National Committee, Gerald Parsky, Jim Brulte, Pete Wilson, Tim Draper, Tom Campbell, Silicon Valley political neophytes, business community political prostitutes, and, ’way on down the list, as a footnote, some decisions may have been made by John McGraw and CRP staff that actually contributed significantly to the debacle. About the only thing those really responsible for losing in 2000 don’t control is the day-to-day functioning of the CRP, but they mean to address that oversight through reorganization.