I am not really a huge fan of some of the decisions of the top leadership of the California Republican Party in the last couple years, I am more a lukewarm fan, and I am quite wary of it’s future. I have made my views known appropriately, discreetly, and also publicly. Past decisions I didn’t like include hiring illegal aliens to manage the finances of the party, generalized support for recalls of Republican incumbent legislators who were at least 80% for us; sideline support, if any, of our own candidate for Lt. Governor, whom vote analysis demonstrated was a 80% plus GOP legislator; and the lack of a meaningful plan to urgently build support for the GOP with Latino voters. I also think we enter the next election cycle without top leadership that can inspire the support we need from the business community to be relevant. All that said, I strongly support the Nehring Plan to give GOP central committee members some clout in the party candidate nominating process, and diminish a little the influence of incumbent officeholders. Proposition 14, which I opposed, has taken away the right of Republican grass roots primary voters to name their party’s nominee in the general election. That being the case, it makes great sense for local Republican party officials, some elected, some appointed, to fill the role for the local voters and to demonstrate that party politics is indeed still relevant in California, despite Proposition 14. Incumbent GOP legislators propose an alternate plan that empowers them at the expense of the GOP stalwarts in the local communities. Their ideas should be rejected. Their invoking Ronald Reagan’s name in the sake of their cause is completely wrong. I was a delegate to the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, and can bare witness that most all the GOP incumbent legislators, including California’s Pete Wilson, supported Gerald Ford and his moderate policies at that convention, not Ronald Reagan. It was the grass roots that showed up at that convention for Ronald Reagan. Party’s are relevant to the candidate selection process because they help test and reveal the policies and character of candidates in advance, thus giving more information, not less, for voters to decide with at the ballot box. The legislators’ proposal would provide less input into the process and less information to voters, I plan to vote with the GOP grassroots, and against the incumbent GOP legislators, at the California Republican Party convention this weekend, because I remember what Ronald Reagan was all about, and who really supported him when it counted.
