Guests of Honor Won’t Attend This Party

California Republicans gathered Friday for a semiannual state convention that was planned more than a year ago to put the state back into the thick of GOP presidential power politics for the first time in 35 years.

The thinking then was that all the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination would be on hand to begin competing for the state’s big block of 163 convention votes to be allocated in the new, early March 26 primary.

To generate interest and suspense, state party Chairman John Herrington instituted a presidential straw poll.

No longer would little states such as Iowa and New Hampshire dominate the early primary schedule and render the late California balloting meaningless. No more could candidates ignore California because its primary came after a nominee was selected.

“This ballot heightens nationwide attention for California in the presidential races,” Herrington said when he sent out the first straw poll ballots in January.

“We estimate that more people will vote in the official California Republican Party presidential ballot than the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire state primary combined.”

As it has happened, the party’s timing was not quite as good as its intentions. After California moved up its primary date, a host of other states rushed even closer to the head of the presidential selection parade, but Iowa and New Hampshire retained their traditional drawing power.

Today, political attention is focused on Monday’s caucuses in Iowa, which again are expected to wield tremendous influence on the course of the nominating process. New Hampshire comes the following week.

None of the candidates planned to interrupt their critical Iowa campaigning to fly to California to address the estimated 2,000 delegates at their convention hotel near San Francisco International Airport. The party instead set aside time for the candidates to speak by telephone today.

Nor did the candidates wage major campaigns to win the straw poll, as they did in some earlier states such as Florida. Still, about 200,000 party members submitted ballots, with the poll results to be announced Sunday.

That left the convention to handle more routine business, such as election of a new national committee man and woman, to debate resolutions and to allow GOP candidates for the Legislature and Congress to promote themselves.

Herrington even had arranged, at the fall convention in Palm Springs, to avert a battle over the abortion issue by reaffirming the state platform a year ahead of the election. The state platform recognizes “the sanctity of human life and that the preborn deserve full protection under the law.”

But competing resolutions regarding the abortion plank in the national platform have been submitted. One calls on the Republican National Convention in San Diego in August to adopt an “abortion-neutral” platform--that is, to remove the current language that calls for making abortion illegal. The other measure would put the state body on record as supporting retention of “our party’s national pro-life platform.”

The Resolutions Committee was scheduled to debate the issue Friday, but the meeting was postponed until today because of the lack of a quorum.