GOP Mulls a New Face

While California Republicans were wooing Arnold Schwarzenegger in hopes he’d save their electoral bacon, they may have been flirting with the wrong actor. Make it “Leonardo DiCaprio for governor,” for surely the party’s latest scheme to bring it back from the near-dead is the political equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

When the state GOP meets in Los Angeles next weekend, it will likely consider a reorganization plan authored by Gerald L. Parsky, a key California supporter of President Bush, and championed by GOP state Senate leader Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), the party’s top strategist. To “professionalize” the party apparatus, the plan takes powers away from the elected, volunteer party chair and places day-to-day control in the hands of a paid chief operating officer. The new official would report to a five-member operations committee appointed by the party’s board of directors, which would be expanded and include, for the first time, a representative of major GOP donors.

The revival attempt comes in the wake of a humiliating showing in the 2000 elections. Four GOP congressional incumbents were defeated, the state Legislature became even more Democratic and the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, lost California to Democrat Al Gore by 12 points. On top of that, then-GOP Chair John McGraw raised hackles with his “mishandled” expenditures and management “blunders.”

That produced a spirited fight to succeed him in 1999. Shawn Steel, the party establishment’s candidate, ran against moderate Brooks Firestone, who argued for “a change, a new image, a new energy, a new competence.” Accusing Firestone of selling out party principles, Steel claimed the GOP simply needed to do a better job of communicating its beliefs and motivating its supporters to vote. Steel narrowly won. He quickly set up a reform and restructuring commission to examine ways to reform the party’s operation and appointed Parsky to chair it.

In a letter to commission members, Parsky wrote that “our base is too narrow and shrinking” because of California’s changing demographics and political priorities. True enough. But how will Parsky’s “non-ideological” makeover solve this problem?

One long-time GOP observer decries the silliness of Republicans “waging a vicious fight” over party organization while allowing themselves to be “neutered in reapportionment.” By accepting the incumbent protection plans released last month, which virtually locked in lop-sided Democratic majorities in the Legislature and congressional delegation, Republicans may have doomed themselves to minority-party status for the next 10 years.

Nor it is clear how the reorganization plan will attract voters the state GOP needs to win more elections: Latinos and women. According to a Field Institute study, California added more than 1.1 million new voters from 1990-2000, and 1 million of them are Latino. In the 1998 governor’s race, Democrat Gray Davis got 70% of their votes. Polls show that Latino voters were alienated by the GOP’s harsh anti-immigrant stance in the early 1990s, and, according to one Republican consultant, “Latinos will not take a second look at the GOP just because we reorganized.”

In the 2000 presidential contest, Gore trounced Bush among California women by a 21% margin. A new organizational chart won’t magically erase the state GOP’s inability to connect with these voters unless restructuring leads to more Republican women winning office. That will require conservative party leaders to soft-pedal their stands on abortion and gun control, and commit to supporting--and funding--diverse candidates with diverse messages.

The strongest opposition to the Parsky plan is coming from the right. And now Steel opposes the plan his commission approved because it would shift control of the party to a “small, exclusive band” of political appointees and away from the conservatives who dominate the grass-roots operation. Steel has endorsed an alternative plan that keeps more of the chair’s power and limits the chief operating officer’s authority.

Some compromise may emerge at next weekend’s conclave. Most Republicans understand how close they are to political irrelevance in California and want to improve their electoral odds. Politicians also know the danger of dissing the capos of a sitting president of their own party. There are less than subtle hints that Bush won’t likely break a sweat helping a state organization that his advisors dismiss as dysfunctional.

It’s a basic axiom of politics that a party must be united to win. Still, what the party unites around is at least as important as how it unites. The difficulties Republicans face connecting with California voters stem from policy misfires, not merely from organizational mishaps. It’s going to take a lot more than hanging out an “under new management” sign to make these problems go away.