State GOP Backs Bush in Straw Vote

Ending a tumultuous convention riddled with unusually bitter infighting, state Republicans on Sunday salvaged a victory for President Bush in a lopsided straw vote that nevertheless left many party conservatives angry.

In a stand-and-be-counted vote portrayed as a showdown between Bush supporters and delegates backing conservative television commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, the President took 89% of the vote to Buchanan’s 11%. A total of 745 delegates stood in support of Bush, while 92 rose to be counted when Buchanan’s name was called.

“The President is going to feel very warm and fuzzy about California and Californians,” said U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan, a Bush ally, in proclaiming victory.

“Stick a fork in Pat Buchanan--he’s done,” said Dan Schnur, a spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson.

The straw vote was seen as a face-saving compromise forged by nervous Republican leaders who, stunned by the enthusiasm for Buchanan at the convention here, realized that efforts to award Bush a more formal endorsement might fail.

A pre-primary endorsement would have required a two-thirds vote to suspend Central Committee rules. Failure to achieve the two-thirds agreement would have been interpreted as a major blow to the Bush campaign.

Buchanan adherents, who earlier claimed victory when the endorsement move was scuttled, were left angry and bitter by the straw vote. Several claimed that they felt intimidated from publicly backing Buchanan’s insurgent candidacy.

Their last-minute effort to have the straw poll taken by secret ballot was turned down by a voice vote of convention delegates.

“I saw a lot of people who I know will vote for Buchanan, voting for Bush,” delegate Francis Anthony Nottke of Huntington Beach, a Buchanan backer, said after the straw poll. “They felt threatened and pushed in a corner and given no voice. . . . A lot of people will carry a lot of rage from this convention.”

He accused Bush operatives of taking down the names of people who stood up in support of Buchanan and of threatening pro-Buchanan Republican clubs with loss of their charters. “These are labor union tactics,” he charged. “There was no freedom to vote your conscience.”

Sunday’s straw vote on the floor of the convention’s general session came after round-the-clock maneuvering by Wilson and Bush operatives working to assure victory and avoid further embarrassment.

Completing the task of party damage control, these operatives managed to fill the assembly room with enough Bush backers that the vote was never in doubt.

Some veteran Republican strategists predicted that the bitterness over the way Buchanan’s people were outmaneuvered will subside as the election year advances. Dornan predicted that many Buchanan supporters will return to the fold once Bush is nominated at the Republican National Convention in Houston this summer because they are “more afraid” of a Democratic victory than of Bush’s policies.

The Bush-Buchanan furor was merely one example of the divisions within California’s Republicans this year. There have been party splits in the past, but the level of rancor seems higher this year and is surfacing earlier in the campaign season.

Curiously, the competition between conservative and moderates stems in part from GOP success and opportunity.

Reapportionment after the 1990 census has created seven congressional seats for California and a slew of U.S. House and legislative districts in which no incumbent is running. Increased Republican registration has heightened GOP prospects for slicing into Democratic majorities in the state Assembly and Senate and in the enlarged 52-member House delegation.

Wilson’s drive to elect more like-minded moderates to the Legislature has angered conservatives and prompted some spirited primary election competition.

So too has Wilson’s appointment of former state Sen. John Seymour of Anaheim to the vacancy created when Wilson resigned from the U.S. Senate to take office as governor. Now running for the final two years of Wilson’s term, Seymour is in a bitter nomination contest against Rep. William E. Dannemeyer of Fullerton, one of the most conservative members of the U.S. House.

Seymour’s presence at this convention was limited to his participation in Friday night’s Senate candidate debate. Departing from tradition, Seymour did not address the convention. When he spoke to the GOP meeting in Anaheim last fall, an estimated 500 Dannemeyer partisans walked out in noisy protest.

And the battle for the GOP nomination for the full six-year U.S. Senate term to succeed retiring Democrat Alan Cranston became increasingly strident. Moderate Rep. Tom Campbell of Palo Alto complained during his debate Friday with conservative commentator Bruce Herschensohn and Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono that “our party can do better than lambasting each other.”

Herschensohn campaign manager Ken Khachigian, a veteran of decades of GOP infighting, said the Senate battle is symbolic of “a fight for the ideological soul of the Republican Party.”

Referring to Campbell, Khachigian said: “We can’t stand idly by and let the party be taken over by liberals like him.”

Campbell campaign manager Ron Smith said the 1992 battles are not necessarily any worse than past fights, but he acknowledged that there seemed to be more turmoil within the party this year.

“The biggest problem the state party has is that the official membership of the party does not reflect the views of the party in general,” Smith said. “I don’t know how conservative the official party is, but it is much more conservative than all Republicans. The public perception of Republicans is different than what Republicans are. That hurts the party.”

Indeed, conservatives tend to dominate the party structure because they often have the time, money and zeal to devote to party affairs, often as a means of pushing their favorite causes, such as opposition to abortion or opposition to gay rights.

Does the heat of the GOP primary campaigns spill over into the fall and hurt the Republican nominees when they run against the Democrats?

“Not usually,” Khachigian said.