Not with my vote.
BTW, I'd like to see the list of successful statewide wimp or RINO candidates.
Lundgren? Huffington? Campbell?
Posted on 02/08/2002 1:49:47 PM PST by Richard M. Nixon
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, February 8, 2002
Former State GOP Chairmen: Riordan Unacceptable as Republican Nominee
SAN JOSE - Three former chairmen of the California Republican Party - John Herrington, Michael Schroeder and John McGraw - today issued the following statement concerning the candidacy of Dick Riordan:
"For the past few months, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has campaigned across California asking Republicans to support him in the upcoming state Primary Election. As former chairmen of the California Republican Party, we feel it is our duty to weigh in on the unusual candidacy of Mr. Riordan.
"After careful review of Mr. Riordan's record, both prior to his announcement as a Republican candidate for Governor, and through his statements on the campaign trail, we feel only one conclusion can be reached: Dick Riordan is no Republican.
"While we as a Republican Party will individually disagree on one issue or another, we are bonded together by a common commitment to a limited, less intrusive government and the belief that every citizen should have the freedom to achieve his or her dreams.
"Mr. Riordan's record has put him at odds with our core beliefs time and time again. While we believe this Party is more than willing to accept differences of opinion and a healthy exchange of ideas, we believe Mr. Riordan's countless endorsements and financial contributions to Democrat candidates, which began long before he became mayor of Los Angeles, have amounted to nothing more than outright betrayal of our basic principles, something we can never accept.
"Moreover, Mr. Riordan's statements on the campaign trail have not only put him at odds with the majority of California's Republicans on social issues, but his statements supporting tax increases and increases in the size of state government stand in sharp contrast with our core beliefs as well.
"Further, Mr. Riordan has shown a genuine intolerance for Republican candidates and grass-roots leaders possessing other view points and an unfortunate interest in his own political career over the interests of his 'fellow' Republicans. We believe these traits make Mr. Riordan particularly ill-suited to serve as the nominee for our party's top position, as Mr. Riordan is likely to engage in a selective support strategy to enhance his own personal motives that will leave many Republican nominees at every level out in the cold.
"As former chairmen of the Republican Party, we are forced to conclude that Mr. Riordan's Republican credentials extend no further than a check in the box of a voter registration form.
"In contrast, Bill Simon has demonstrated in the past months that he is not only committed to up-holding the core Republican belief of limited, less intrusive government, but has also shown a genuine appreciation for Republicans of every stripe. He has spent months campaigning across the state, building a solid, genuine grass-roots organization that will be of the utmost benefit to our state party in the General Election. He has also pledged whole-heartedly to support every GOP nominee in November.
"Bill Simon is clearly the candidate who should represent the California Republican Party in the General Election."
###
Date: 1967-68.
Place: Santa Cruz County, California
Election: California presidential primary
The Vietnam War was in full swing. I was young, energetic, smart, and had grown up in an extremely political household. My father was a long-time Democratic Party operative and my godfather was California Congressman Phil Burton (Dem. - San Francisco), so I knew how to read election returns, and how to count.
UC Santa Cruz was then a brand-new school. It had opened for the 1965-66 academic year with about 350 students. In 1966-67 they had moved out of trailers and there were two residential colleges with about 1200 students. I started as a freshman in the fall of 1967 at which time there were 2000 students in three colleges.
And the students were brilliant. Our Chancellor, Dean McHenry, had been the college roommate and long-time friend of UC President Clark Kerr, and Kerr let McHenry syphon off the top UC applicants for UC Santa Cruz. This meant that the place got the top 1% of California high school graduates for its first four years. As high school grades and SAT scores then tracked family income pretty close, the average family income of my freshman class exceeded that of Stanford's.
There were many effects of that, some comical. First example: culture shock between Bay Area kids and LA kids. And us Bay Area types weren't the only weird ones. My first roommate was from Glendale and the high point of his high school career was leading his junior class to victory over the senior class in Glendale High's annual bottlecap drive. He moved out of my room after one quarter and transferred to UCLA the second quarter.
Second example: a lot of my class were Hollywood kids who had grown up on their parents' sets and learned camera angles with their mothers' milk. The father of my best friend there had written the screenplay for _The Longest Day_. A major New York film critic was a visiting professor my senior year to teach a course on film. It was a disaster because our Hollywood kids turned out en masse to learn about the craft of making movies, while the critic wanted to teach art criticism. On one occasion he said that a particular shot in one movie meant the director was trying to achieve a partcular effect through use of an interesting camera angle. A student then got up and said that, no, his father was the lead (something - maybe lead grip) and that the cameraman made the shot on his own because the director was drunk that day and they only had the stock to make a good shot that particular way. This incident was written up in _Playboy_ about twenty years ago - I believe the article was titled, _Shut Up and Show the Movies_ because that was the tacit compromise the instructor made with the students.
I mention this to emphasize that UC Santa Cruz was then an intellectual hothouse filled with _underclassman_ undergraduates (few upperclassmen due to the campus being so new, and the only graduate students were all astronomers associated with the Lick Observatory), i.e., with lots of energy & spare time (no social activities to mention available given the location and the campus' newness - the town's only two theaters showed (a) Disney and (b) motorcycle flicks), being away from home for the first time, and most importantly, privileged, relatively wealthy, backgrounds. Our parents were movers & shakers in their fields so we expected to be able to do that ourselves.
And I was definitely not the only politician's kid - there were lots.
And the Vietnam War was in full swing and the students, AND their parents, desperately wanted to do something about it.
So my freshman year was politically explosive. And I knew how to light the match.
I spent a lot of time in the fall and winter studying years of Santa Cruz County election returns, from which I concluded that the place was a hotbed of moderate Republicans. Then I started walking precincts based on those returns, mostly looking at the houses and getting a demographic feel for the place, notably in terms of how to differentiate between Democratic and Republican precincts.
Then I started asking Republicans how they felt about the Vietnam War. They all hated it and wanted to vote against it.
Bingo. Governor Ronald Reagan was running in the GOP presidential primary as a favorite son, and had no competition. So it was _impossible_ for anti-war Republicans to express that opinion in the GOP primary election.
I asked them if they'd change their party registration to Democrat if there were Democratic anti-war candidates in the Democratic presidential primary. Most of them said yes, but a lot, even of those, said "Never, never, never!!!!" if the only such candidate was Robert Kennedy (whom they loathed for some reason I've never figured out).
So I told my father, who was then trying to find a Democratic candidate to run against President Johnson. Robert Kennedy was then refusing to do so (for reasons I won't go into now, but I wrote a chapter on that in my senior thesis, the chapter title being _How to Run For President Without Being Caught At It_). He and Jerry Hill, then president of the California Democratic Council, eventually settled on Senator Eugene McCarthy. The details on that appear in Richard Stout's _People_.
So Eugene McCarthy entered the California Democratic Presidential primary. And my walking polls showed he was acceptable to Republicans.
So my friends and I, notably Mike Matthew and Dave Mehr at Stevenson, organized a student-run McCarthy for President campaign run out of Dorm Five at Stevenson. I was nominally its leader, but the division of labor was that I set the strategy, acted as front man, recruited & motivated students, and got as many goodies for us as possible from the state campaign run by my father, while Mike and Dave set up and ran the day to day operations.
But I was in charge of the re-registration campaign. We had about 10-12 days from the start of classes in the spring quarter to the close of registration for the primary, and I convinced Mike and Dave that to front-load our student volunteer effort on re-registration of Republicans as Democrats. My analysis showed that would produce far more votes for McCarthy per manhour of volunteer precinct walking than straight primary activity.
I expected to get a large reaction, but not what happened. It was like dropping a crystal into a super-saturated solution. There is no way that our @ 80 students spending four hours a day, for ten days, re-registering Republicans could by itself have produced the results we got. The Republicans we contacted must have started calling their friends.
My recollection from 34 years ago is that about 10%-20% of all the Republicans in Santa Cruz County switched their registration to the Democratic Party _in ten days_, giving the county its first Democratic majority since the Civil War. Which was the end for the GOP in Santa Cruz County. And these people were our margin of victory in the primary - Santa Cruz was second only to tiny Butte County in giving McCarthy a majority over Kennedy.
Not that it mattered after Bobby went down the hallway where someone waited for him with a gun.
But the lesson Republicans here should learn from that is:
Elections are about _winning.
Political parties win in America by being a big tent. Giving a party a single message is generally lethal. The Democrats are learning that right now about gun control.
Why am I a Republican after being a Democrat for most of my adult life and worse, a Democratic _campaign manager_? Because the Democrats ceased to be a big tent on national security.
A RINO in Congress is another vote for a GOP House speaker or Senate Majority Leader, and that means something. A RINO in the legislature or on a school board is a potential future Republican Governor.
As owner Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders put it, "Just win, baby."
The former CA GOP Chairmen knew what they're talking about. And Dickie Pooh for all his money and name recognition, he's NO Republican. After having witnessed his inability to stand up to Gray Davis's slashing attacks even before the general election, CA conservatives unanimously agree he's not qualified to lead our party to victory come November. About the only candidate who can do that and who has the support of former NY Mayor Rudy Guiliani and who doesn't apologize for being a conservative is Bill Simon. Let's make sure he's the one who faces Gray Davis head on in the fall.
You mean winning?
You and nearly every other "Don't agree" on this thread are vindicating Limbaugh's pronouncement on this subject; you are the right-wing side of the "virtue in losing" crowd, just like the NJ GOP establishment was the RINO side. Out of spite, party purity, or just plain stupidity, you'd rather install RATS than attain a win for the party.
I don't care if there's scarcely a dime of difference between Riordan and Davis; you know what he and a GOP-controlled legislature are good for? Ensuring the existence of some sort of political machine for Dubya in 2004 and the safety of the GOP congressmen! Also, RINO's, more often than not will support the party leadership on important, defining issues and votes. And even if they don't, the mere fact that one party is the numerical majority and the other isn't can decide the entire legislative agenda.
Do the names Tom Daschle and Jim Jeffords mean anything to you? Jeffords votes little differently now than he did before - though I doubt we could have counted on his vote for Ashcroft before the jump - but the mere fact that he made the GOP the minority empowers Daschle to bottle up any piece of Bush legislation he chooses.
What's up with Howard Stern? Was Riordan on his show or sumpin'?
Parity in the Assembly, a Republican governor and a number statewide officials elected. A far better performance than today. Oh, and Proposition 187 won with 59% of the vote.
Democrats advising Republicans to abandon the voters and winning issues. Who would have thunk it?
Not with my vote.
BTW, I'd like to see the list of successful statewide wimp or RINO candidates.
Lundgren? Huffington? Campbell?
http://www.tommcclintock.com/
Check out the debt clock.
I'd back Simon in the primary hands down. Period.
If Jones won, I'd hold my nose over his wishy washyness, but I'd vote for him.
As for the Dick, I'd vote for DAVIS. Riordan isn't a RINO. He's worse. He's a democrat who makes Carl Levin look almost conservative. Davis is a gun grabber. Riordan is a total gun banner. Both are pro-abort and want tax money funding it. Riordan is for higher taxes as well. Riordan backed BOXER, FEINSWINE, and DAVIS in their last elections.
I also fight to win, but Riordan would not win for the GOP. He's destroy it, especially at the bottom of the ticket. Geoff Fieger nearly KO'ed the dems in 1998 in Michigan at the bottom of the ticket. Only one major dem won then.
Simon gives people something to vote for. Riordan only gives people something to vote against. The conservatives would stay home for Riordan, and not only hurt Riordan, but the good GOP'ers down the ticket. Simon would help the rest of the ticket.
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