YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. – Bill Warner is hardly a naive man. He ran his own engineering firm for three decades, and sold the assets just before the economy tanked. He built his dream home on a majestic hill abutting a national park, back when the housing market was steady. While some neighbors have since been foreclosed upon, Warner is resurfacing his flagstone deck. And so he understands, quite clearly, that in the world of politics, his little group — officially, the Lincoln Club of the Morongo Basin — is but a molecule in the figurative drop in the bucket of...