This past weekend, 1500 Republican leaders from all around the Golden State gathered for the biennial organization convention of the California Republican Party. Despite the rainy weather outside of the Capitol Hyatt Hotel and the Convention Center, inside Republicans were excited to be able to elect new Party leaders, and they selected some great ones.
Lots has been and will be written about the weekend, and frankly I am ready to take some time off after spending months on the campaign trail myself. But I will take a few minutes to pen some brief observations from the weekend.
My first one — our Republican Party remains 100% committed to our core Republican values. It was clear our new Chairman, Ron Nehring, and our new Vice Chairman, Tom Del Becarro, are committed to seeing the GOP win in elected by pushing our winning issues with the voters, not capitulating and adopting the positions of the liberal Democrat Party. As a matter of fact, there was a strong, vibrant campaign for Vice Chairman waged all weekend long at the convention, and both of the candidates were equally as conservative, both emphasizing the need for our Party to strike a contrasting view to those presented by the Party of Hillary Clinton. After Del Becarro’s convincing victory on Sunday, his opponent, Tom Bordonaro, came up on to the stage to give a rousing congratulations to Del Becarro, that really exemplified a spirit of team-work and unity. Duf Sundheim was applauded for his hard work — as he should be — he selflessly gave everything to the California GOP for four years.
Elected Regional Vice Chairmen at this convention were Jerry Maltby, Paul Bruno, Laura Gadke, Mark Pruner, Luis Buhler, Doug Boyd, Aquanetta Warren, and, of course, yours truly. I look forward to serving with all of them. Of course, others who continue to serve on the Board who were elected by the CRP Membership include Treasurer Keith Carlson, Secretary Jalene Forbis and Republican National Committeemembers Barbara Alby and Tim Morgan.
There were a lot of events that took place at the convention – from the Governor’s starring role in the Friday night banquet, to Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani’s lunchtime appearance. Those have all been and will continue to be written about on this site. And most assuredly we’ll be able to cover some of the more notable ‘inside baseball’ aspects of the event when this website publishes its traditional "Winners and Losers of the Convention" column which will run one week from today. But I did want to spend a moment to talk about the end of the convention, and the CRP leadership meetings that followed.
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