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Since the last California Republican Party convention in February, when delegates accepted a new power-sharing arrangement between elected party officers and President Bush’s closest allies in the state, there was a feeling among conservatives that the union would be tense and turbulent.
“The nonelected should not be running the party over elected officials,” Republican Party Treasurer Michael der Manouel told me on the final day of the conclave. “It’s very disturbing.”
The issue has now become a full-blown crisis in the California party, and the next state convention (scheduled for September in Los Angeles) promises to be a battle royal between strongly conservative elected party leaders and Los Angeles “superlawyer” Gerald Parsky, a liberal Republican who is considered the president’s closest political friend in California.
Under the terms of the February arrangement, Parsky was made chairman of a 25-member committee to review the party’s operations and offer suggestions to make it more effective – a potentially constructive enterprise in a state whose 54 electoral votes Al Gore captured by more than one million ballots last year and where Republicans hold only one statewide office and are outnumbered in both houses of the state legislature.
But the final document that Parsky presented to the members of the “Restructuring and Reform Commission” portends more intra-party dissension than greater effectiveness. (The plan will be debated by the party Rules Committee before being considered for approval at the fall convention.)
A copy of Parsky’s proposed changes to the party structure was obtained by Human Events. It indicates that the party’s bylaws would undergo a “redefinition” to “delete chief executive powers” from the job description of the state party chairman (presently Shawn Steel, a stalwart conservative). The real power within the party would be transferred to a “Chief Operating Officer” (COO), who would report not to the party’s elected chairman but to the 20-member Board of Directors of the party – some of whom would be appointed by Parsky himself.
In addition, the new rules would eliminate the three regional vice chairmen of the party, who have been elected every two years by the state convention. Instead, the state would be divided into eight geographical regions. Each region would elect a vice chairman. But instead of having these vice chairmen elected at a convention controlled by the party activists – who are overwhelmingly conservative – they would apparently be elected by a ballot mailed to every registered Republican in the region. This would help party moderates and liberals – and in some cases might make the amount of money someone could spend on a vice chairman campaign determinative.
Perhaps more significantly, “the president of the United States or his designee,” regardless of what state he comes from, would become an automatic member of the GOP State Central Committee and control as many appointments to that committee as the state chairman (who now appoints 12 members).
Presumably, Parsky would be the designee – and this rule would make him in practice the dictator of the California Republican Party, some observers predict.
“This plan clearly hurts party activists and will lead to the most distressful state convention in years,” predicted State Executive Committee Member Steve Frank of Los Angeles. Frank is one of the few conservatives who served on Parsky’s 25-member commission.
“With the chairman’s power being emasculated,” Frank told Human Events, “power now goes to an unelected official, the COO, who will report not to one person but to 20. So what happens if he has 20 bosses? He gets his way by courting 11 of them. And this will make future chairmen former congressmen or former governors who will just be figureheads.”
Frank went on to warn that, if enacted, the plan “could come back to hurt President Bush. Imagine if the state party voted to support [UC Regent] Ward Connerly’s new anti-affirmative action initiative. The press would say, ‘Bush supports scrapping quotas’ and twist it to hurt him. Or if the party voted to oppose such an initiative, the headlines might read, ‘Bush splits with conservatives on quotas.’
“Either way, the President gets hurt by making him a member of our committee. Someone needs to save George W. Bush from his friends in California.”
He added that the very idea is “silly” from the start since Bush is not a California voter. “So who does he then give the 12 committee assignments to? Sen. McCain? Speaker Hastert?” Frank quipped.
Former state GOP Chairman John McGraw is outspoken in his opposition to the Parsky plan. “This plan is ridiculous,” said McGraw. “It leaves the chairman responsible for raising the money but with no ability to determine what is done with it.”
The probability of a convention battle this fall is another illustration of the troubled relationship California Republican activists have had with Parsky. Several sources on the State Executive Committee told Human Events that, at Parsky’s urging, $67,000 from the treasury of the party’s “Victory 2000” committee (which was created to coordinate state GOP campaigns in the last election) went to a headhunting firm for the purpose of finding an executive director to serve under Steel.
“They advertised in papers and sent thousands of letters to nonprofits and to major business schools – never really considering whether or not their eventual choice knew anything about politics or that California had 58 counties,” said one GOP critic.
Eventually, the party hired Ryan Ervin who had just completed a stint as executive director of the neighboring Nevada GOP.
One party activist from Southern California who requested anonymity told us that Parsky had suggested in a meeting with him that the party cut back its twice-a-year conventions to only one per year – another proposal sure to rile party conservatives.
But will the same party activists go so far as to reject Parsky’s plan at the fall convention and, in effect, show the door to the president’s closest political friend in their state? Discussing the risks of such a course, San Gabriel Valley lawyer and State Executive Committeeman Doug Boyd said, “It has been strongly implied that the president and the administration would not help with speakers for our fund-raising events here unless the reform package is adopted.”
Responding to the suggestions the White House would snub the party unless it acquiesces to Parsky’s demands, conservative former State Sen. Dick Mountjoy, now the California Republican Assembly president, snapped: “That’s bunk! George W. Bush has bigger fish to fry than this!”
Other conservatives signaled that they were willing to say no to Parsky and his package. “The ‘reforms’ being discussed, whether they be good internal changes or not, will not move one additional Republican voter to the polls,” said Der Manouel. “So in my view, they are largely a waste of time.”
Parsky did not return calls.
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