I have had 100% confirmation that long-time California Republican Party Chief Operating Officer Mike Vallante is going to be soon departing from his post to take on new responsibilities with a presidential campaign. Back once upon a time, when I served as Executive DIrector of the CRP (since then, the title has been changed to COO), Mike Vallante worked for the CRP as its Finance Director. He’s a great guy. Which campaign, you ask? A picture is worth a thousand words.… Read More

I was very pleased to read the announcement that today Governor Schwarzenegger appointed retired State Senator Ross Johnson as the new Chairman of the State’s Fair Political Practices Commission. This is an outstanding appointment. Ross Johnson is someone I have known since I first got involved in politics in the late ’80’s. By then, he had already cut his teeth as a conservative leader in the State Assembly, where he had been serving since 1978. I can remember like it was yesterday the hard-fought special election that Ross won in 1995 to become elected to the State Senate. It was a hard campaign, but a fun one. Ross was an outstanding candidate, and served as a great State Senator until term-limits forced him out of the legislature in 2004. It’s not always that I know a high-level appointee well enough to gush-on about them like this, but since I know that Ross, a humble man, will hate every minute of it, I will take the opportunity share that he is perfect for… Read More

I’m a little behind at my tally of Gubernatorial appointees, in terms of how many Democrats, how many Republicans, etcetera. I’ll blame my tardiness on my campaign for Party office. That said, I’ve dutifully saved the releases, and will play catch-up soon.

In the meantime, today the Governor announced some appointments worthy of noting right away:

GOVERNOR APPOINTS HEAD OF POLITICAL EFFORT TO PASS BONDS TO COMMISSION THAT WILL DOLE OUT BOND FUNDS The Gov has appointed James Earp to the State Transportation Commission: When I saw this appointment, my eyes popped out of my head. I cannot even imagine the logic behind ‘rewarding’ the political efforts of the Chairman of the Campaign to pass last year’s bond measures with an appointment to the extremely powerful State Commission that will be doling out much of the funds. Yet, in a shades-of-Gray-Davis move, that is what the Governor has done. Understand that James Earp, a Democrat who has served as chairman of the Yes on 1A-1E Campaign (and… Read More

I sent this to CRP Members and to FR E-mail Subscribers this morning, but since there are so many FR readers who do not get the free daily e-mail update, I thought I would throw this up here, too…

Last Saturday, I was humbled to be elected to the important position of Vice Chairman, South, of the California Republican Party. In this capacity, I will serve on the Board of Directors of the CRP, and act as a liaison between the State GOP and the County Republican Parties in Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial Counties. Of course, each of us on the CRP Board has a duty to well-represent all 1500 Central Committee Members from all around California.

To those of you who supported my candidacy, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you so much for your support. Clearly my victory by nearly a two-to-one vote margin was because of the tremendous and widespread support that I had since announcing my candidacy last Summer. I could not… Read More

A couple of days ago, I kinda loosely criticized the SD Union-Tribune for the lack of coverage following Ron Nehring’s Sunday election as chairman of the state GOP (see the post).

As it turns out, I missed the fact that two days BEFORE the "ascension," the SDUT ran a detailed story by John Marelius on the anticipated Nehring victory (read it here), including this great lede:

Ron Nehring’s lifelong political odyssey has taken him to some of the most turbulent outposts on the planet – Iraq, Bosnia, the West Bank, Haiti, the Grossmont Union High School District and now the California Republican Party. My reason for missing it — although I have no excuse — can only be explained by my travel to the Sacramento GOP convention the day of the story (who reads the paper on the plane, when there’s such good foodto be had?).

So, my apologies… Read More

The CRA Scorecard is here. And it has some interesting items. You can see the press release here.

Unfortunately, there were only 5 Assemblymembers that received %100 (La Malfa, Huff, Mountjoy, Walters And DeVore). No one in the State Senate received a perfect score. 60 lawmakers, all democrats earned a ZERO.

Lowest GOP Score: Shirley Horton 35%. Other interesting tidbits is looking at lawmakers that may run against each other for higher office. FR’s Doug La Malfa (100%) and Rick Keene (71%). Or things that make go huh? like Keith Richman (65%) earning a higher score than Bill Emmerson (47%).

Tom Harmon almost beat Abel Maldanado in the Senate even though he missed 8 votes in the Senate, because he wasn’t elected there yet! CRA has a policy (before my time) of scoring absences against the lawmaker. The philosophy has been that they "get paid to vote". Sometimes scores get hurt that way. For example Todd Spitzer missed the votes on the bonds, becasue his wife was giving birth, so they were… Read More

I know this is not the trendy opinion, but I think the move to change the primary date to February is a foolish idea.

The first time the idea came up was in 1994, when the Assemblyman Jim Costa suggested that California move its primary to late March to "make California" more relevant. Costa said he was tired of California being the bank for the rest of the country. Candidates should do more than just visit California for money, he said. The vote was usually over by June, he said, so California is not relevant to the ultimate selection of the parties’ nominees. A March primary was supposed to be an experiment to increase the influence of the state. I actually voted for that bill to test the Costa experiment.

It was a failure. The primary was over one week before the late March date. More important than that, it also made the state’s legislative and Congressional primaries a mess.

Asecond attempt to move the presidential primary to early March in 2000 failed as well. The experiments failed for one simple reason. Every time California moved its primary, every other state moved its primary ahead of California so that… Read More

I don’t know about you, but to me, it seems like sometime in the last couple of weeks, it seems like someone flipped a switch and the 2008 Presidential primary has begun! Here in California, Democratic Presidential contender Barack Obama and GOP Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani are both making multi-day swings. Of course the other front-runners – Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain and Mitt Romney – have all been out campaigning in the Golden State, and all have plans to return here again soon. Of course, with the high likelihood of Californian’s Presidential primary moving up to next February (the bill has already passed the State Senate on the fast-track and is now awaiting action in the Assembly), these visits will increase even more as all of theses candidates will need to visit not only to raise money from our donor-rich state, but suddenly our delegates become more meaningful in the quest for each Party’s respective nomination. Looking at the GOP… Read More