Posted on 09/17/2002 8:53:05 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
The best way to understand the current state of the California Republican Party, says John J. Pitney Jr., professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is to review the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.
A customer walks into a pet shop with a dead parrot, demanding his money back from a clerk who insisted the bird was only resting, shouting: "This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace!"
Professor Pitney said the California Republican Party is on its back because it lacks money, an inspiring candidate at the top of the ticket or any prospect for regaining majorities in the State Legislature or the Congressional delegation for at least a decade. It now has barely 35 percent of the California electorate and is beset by internal squabbling between conservatives and moderates.
"There's not a lot the Republicans can do right now," Professor Pitney said.
Nathan Fletcher, the state party's political director, plays the role of the pet shop clerk, who insists, against all evidence, that the bird is quite alive.
"We're not dead or resting, man," Mr. Fletcher said. "We're moving forward."
But even party loyalists acknowledge fundamental problems.
"It's like a totally dysfunctional family," said Richard J. Riordan, the moderate Republican who is a former mayor of Los Angeles and was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination for governor this year. "They need new leadership there."
Republican leaders concede that because of redistricting and the power of incumbency, Democratic majorities in the Congressional delegation (31 to 21), the State Senate (26 to 14) and Assembly (50 to 30) appear locked in for the rest of the decade. Republicans hold only one statewide office, secretary of state, and express little hope of regaining either of the United States Senate seats.
"Our party is in virtual leadership chaos," said Shawn Steel, chairman of the California Republican Party. "We don't have a governor, we don't have senators, we don't have clout in the Assembly or Senate. We don't have any natural leaders, and we have a lot of second-guessers."
Yet Mr. Steel and some other Republican leaders expressed optimism about Bill Simon Jr.'s challenge to Gov. Gray Davis.
A Los Angeles judge on Thursday threw out a jury's civil fraud judgment against Mr. Simon's family investment firm, giving new life to a campaign that even some supporters had declared all but hopeless.
"That lawsuit was hanging over us like a bad nightmare," Mr. Steel said. "The funding was drying up, basically there was a morale problem."
Now Mr. Simon has a new chance to take on Mr. Davis, who, despite his huge campaign war chest and his ubiquitous television advertising, remains widely unpopular with voters.
"This is a huge rejuvenation," Mr. Steel said.
But even if Mr. Simon should pull off an upset — and it remains a long shot — the party of Earl Warren, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan will face chronic problems.
Party registration has been in a 15-year decline, with only 34.9 percent of voters declaring themselves Republicans in 2000, although party officials said they had detected a slight gain in more recent registrations.
The rapidly growing Latino electorate is moving strongly toward the Democratic Party, in part because Republicans still have an image as anti-immigrant after party leaders' supported Proposition 187, which denied public schooling and other services to illegal immigrants. Voters passed the proposition in 1994, but a federal court later rejected it.
Republicans are also faring poorly with women, who as a group take more liberal positions on abortion, gun control, gay rights, education and the environment than most Republican candidates in California. The gap between women registered as Democrats and those registered as Republicans is now 15 points, and there is no evidence that the gulf is narrowing, said Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan polling and research firm.
In addition, the decline of the military industry in California has led to an exodus of as many as 200,000 jobs since the early 1990's. Many of those workers were reliable Republican voters. The new job-creating industries — technology and the Internet — have produced younger and more independent-minded voters.
"These demographic trends, and the perception that the Republican Party is more conservative than most independent voters, have all been working against the party," Mr. Baldassare said.
Nonetheless, there are opportunities for Republicans, he said. The state is mired in debt and faces long-term energy and water shortages. President Bush maintains high approval ratings here, and many view the State Democratic Party as too far to the left.
What the Republican Party needs, many political analysts say, is a candidate who can appeal to independents and moderates, or who, like Mr. Reagan, can by sheer force of personality transform state politics.
"The top of the ticket race defines most outcomes from the top to the bottom of the ballot," said Dan Schnur, a California Republican operative. "Both parties have been losing members over the past decade. There are huge numbers of crossover voters. One strong, dynamic candidate can remake the electorate."
Few are saying today that Bill Simon is that candidate. Until someone or something reshuffles the deck, the party must rebuild itself.
James L. Brulte, the Republican leader in the State Senate, said the party needed to return to basics: building voter lists, recruiting candidates, ringing doorbells.
"If we took one-tenth of the $80 million we spent on the last three elections and put it into legislative races and building a party infrastructure that would help in future elections, we would be a lot better off today," Mr. Brulte said.
Mr. Steel, the party chairman, agreed, and said he was trying to raise the money to counter the Democrats' significant technological edge over the Republicans, for example a much larger computerized voter database. Mr. Steel hinted that the person who could terminate the Democrats' electoral advantage could be waiting in the wings.
"Watch Arnold," he said, as in Schwarzenegger, who is considering a run for governor in 2006.
Oh, I don't know. Winning the governor's mansion would be a nice morale boost.
And I think Shawn Steel just might be that GOP candidate waiting in the wings.
Isn't this the idiot whom Karl Rove imposed on the California Republican Party against their protests, after kicking out all the local leaders? And now he says there's a leadership crisis?
I don't know much about California politics, but it's obvious that this guy is a disaster. He said he was a fund raiser, but under his leadership all the big money Republicans have been giving to Gray Davis. They need to put in a chairman who knows what he's doing, pronto. It's very late in the day for a change, but this guy, who I understand is a Country Club Republican that supported Riordan in the primary, is a whopping failure.
Calling Karl Rove. You screwed up, now fix it, quick!
Shannon something?
The illegal-alien vote. The deceased-persons vote. And now, legislation to allow individuals to register on election day. They must bring "proof of residence"--unforgeable documents such as power bills or phone bills.
Once we had an all-Dem legislature plus a Dem governor, the game was lost. The hordes of illegals are voting, and they are not voting "R".
In other words: Make Your Time, You Have No Chance to Survive.
I wish this were otherwise but IMHO CA is irredeemably lost.
--Boris
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