Free Republic

SAN JOSE — Four years ago, in the month before Election Day, representatives of Republican statewide candidates met with Gerald Parsky, President Bush's state campaign chief and the designated custodian of the party's checkbook, to learn what resources would be coming their way. One of the political strategists who was there recalls being startled by Parsky's decision: Dollars for everyone else, but pennies for Sen. Tom McClintock, the GOP candidate for controller. When challenged on that decision, said the strategist, who asked not to be identified, Parsky held firm: For McClintock, there would be only crumbs. In the end, McClintock...

Pro-Arnold forces in the California Republican Party (Sundheim, Kingsley, Parsky) took a few more big steps toward tamping down the rebellion on the right this afternoon at the party’s state convention in San Jose. First, state Senator Tom McClintock, the party’s conservative favorite, delivered a very well-received luncheon address in which he extolled the virtues of his “running mate,” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. McClintock, who ran a respectably distant third in the 2003 recall election, is running for lieutenant governor. Then conservative leaders found most of their resolutions criticizing Arnold’s policy positions shot down in the party resolutions committee. The rightists...

SAN JOSE – Is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Republican enough? It's a question that has dominated the state GOP convention in the Silicon Valley this weekend and will be answered by more than 1,000 convention delegates in a floor vote today. Republican state Chairman Duf Sundheim described the discussion over Schwarzenegger's policies as a historic occasion. But party activists who accuse Schwarzenegger of rejecting his Republican mantle say what is transpiring is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to silence intra-party dissent. Saturday afternoon, a party committee that shapes such discussions at the convention effectively reduced a brawl over Schwarzenegger's...