State Republicans Pick Conservative Leader

State GOP activists wrapped up their weekend convention Sunday by peaceably settling a divisive leadership fight, squaring away rules for the next presidential primary and slapping at the party’s recent gubernatorial nominee.

After hearing from a seventh and final presidential hopeful--New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith--delegates stuck with precedent and elevated the party’s vice chairman, businessman John McGraw, to a two-year term as party head, rejecting the insurgent candidacy of a more moderate challenger.

Putting on their Sunday-best behavior, party activists forsook the heated rhetoric that earlier marked the leadership fight, skipping formal debate and going straight to a vote.

“All of you know that I have very strong convictions,” McGraw said in assuming the chairmanship. “That does not mean and will not mean in this party any intolerance. I want this party to be the party of honest and open debate. When that is done, I want us all to unite and go after Democrats.”

Surface tranquillity aside, the chairmanship fight reflected the divisions splitting not just the California Republican Party, but the national GOP as well.

Typically, the chairman’s post automatically goes to the vice chairman, in this case McGraw, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and longtime conservative activist. But McGraw drew an unusually strong challenge from more moderate activists, led by Modesto businessman Nick Bavaro, who were concerned that the party’s vocal stance on social issues--particularly abortion--have hurt the GOP, especially among women and independent voters.

McGraw heightened those concerns when he was quoted last month in a Catholic newspaper saying that “killing our babies [is the] issue of the century. Compared to that, cutting taxes or any other issue pales in comparison.”

McGraw never disavowed the quote, but sought to place it in context by saying that he was merely expressing a personal belief that would not govern his stewardship of party affairs. The chairman’s primary role, aside from presiding over the party’s twice-yearly conventions, is to raise money for the state GOP and its candidates

McGraw handily defeated Bavaro in balloting at Sunday’s closing session. Also bested was former state Assemblyman Brooks Firestone of Los Olivos, who ran for vice chairman as part of the more moderate slate and lost to Shawn Steel, a Beverly Hill attorney and the state party treasurer.

Aside from choosing new officers for the 2000 election season, convention delegates heard from Smith, the seventh GOP presidential hopeful to come West for the weekend, hoping to acquaint himself with California in advance of the state’s earlier-than-usual March 2000 primary.

Standing squarely with the party’s social conservatives, Smith declared that opposition to abortion is a defining issue for the Republican Party; indeed, he suggested, it was the only reason for the GOP to exist.

“Killing children is the central issue facing our nation today and it needs to be stopped,” Smith said. Like the now-defunct Whig Party, he went on, the GOP could ultimately wither and die--deservedly so--”If we don’t stand up for life.”

Before breaking camp, the party delivered a slap at Dan Lungren, a GOP leader until his landslide defeat in the governor’s race last fall. The former state attorney general ended the campaign with a surplus of about $600,000, thanks in no small part to about $1.2 million the party provided his campaign in the election’s waning days.

Noting that the California Republican Party ended the campaign with a deficit exceeding $300,000, the party’s resolutions committee voted Saturday to effectively demand a refund, urging the erstwhile nominee to pay off that debt and “give our party a fresh start.”

Lungren declined comment. “I’m not talking about that,” he told reporters at Saturday’s session. “You want to talk about something serious, I’ll talk about something serious.”

The resolution, made public Sunday, died along with a raft of other policy statements when the convention adjourned in the late afternoon for lack of a quorum. McGraw told reporters afterward he would work to prevent the resolution from resurfacing.

“I think it’s classless,” he said. “I hope to think our party has a little more class than that.”

In a housekeeping matter, GOP delegates adopted a change in rules to address the problem posed by the state’s so-called blanket primary, agreeing to go along with a legislative solution designed to solve the problem for both parties.

The national Democrats and Republicans could theoretically refuse to seat California’s delegates to their 2000 presidential nominating conventions because of the state’s mix-and-match ballot, which allows Democrats to vote for Republicans, and vice versa. That system violates national party rules holding that only party members can vote to nominate their presidential standard-bearers.

Legislation is pending in Sacramento to address the problem by, in effect, having Californians vote twice. Voters would still be able to select the candidates of their choice, regardless of party affiliation, on one ballot. Registered partisans would cast another ballot to vote for delegates committed to their party’s candidates. The votes of registered Republicans would be counted toward apportioning the GOP’s convention delegates and only Democratic votes would count for the Democratic candidates.

In a setback to the weekend’s image-sprucing efforts, party leaders were forced Sunday to repudiate racist materials that surfaced in the fight over the vice chairman post. Delegates routinely wake up to a sheaf of campaign propaganda shoved beneath their hotel-room doors. Some of the materials distributed anonymously over the weekend referred, crudely, to the use of “immigrant farm labor” at Firestone’s Santa Barbara-area winery. Both Firestone and Steel disavowed the materials.

“This stuff is absolutely unacceptable,” said Michael Schroeder, the outgoing party chairman, who made minority outreach a priority of his two-year tenure and promised an investigation to identify and expel those responsible for the offending materials.