Convention Is Full of Land Mines for State GOP

By George Skelton

Sept. 30, 2002 12 AM PT

GARDEN GROVE — The California Republican Party, to put it charitably, is currently only half the party that Democrats are. Maybe that’s why the GOP thinks it should hold twice as many conventions.

Half as effective, meet twice as much.

This hasn’t been working, clearly. Democrats dominate partisan politics in California, from the governor’s office down through the Legislature and the congressional delegation.

The GOP resists change, however. And while Democratic activists were out registering voters over the weekend, the Republican hard core was holding yet another state convention in a Garden Grove hotel.

California Republicans meet twice each year, in late winter and early fall. Democrats get by very nicely with one annual convention in early spring.

“What are we doing here, 39 days before the election, talking to each other?” asked former Assemblyman Tom Bordonaro, the San Luis Obispo County GOP chairman who recently was elected county assessor.

“We should be out in the trenches.”

Republicans weren’t just talking, they were trashing each other in one stunning incident--and spilling party blood all over a luncheon originally organized to help unify the convention behind underdog gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon Jr.

The Friday luncheon of the party’s executive committee was billed as an opportunity--for $40--to hear Simon strategists Ed Rollins and Sal Russo explain how their inexperienced, underfinanced, trouble-plagued candidate was going to whip Gov. Gray Davis. (Answer: By reminding voters why they don’t like him.)

But first the luncheon crowd had to suffer through party chairman Shawn Steel’s long berating of President Bush’s man in California, investor Gerald L. Parsky.

This was all about petty party turf. Parsky had led a party overhaul that stripped Steel of some power. Steel, a Palos Verdes Peninsula lawyer, has been waging a losing guerrilla counterattack.

“Everybody’s going like, ‘Whaaaa?,’ ” said Colusa County party chairman Jerry Maltby, a cattleman and rice grower. “This isn’t why we’re here.”

State Assembly Republican leader Dave Cox of Fair Oaks angrily walked out.

Simon state chairman John Herrington of Walnut Creek later told Steel, sarcastically: “Thank you for devoting this meeting to Bill Simon and the governor’s race.”

Saturday didn’t dawn any brighter for the Simon camp.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the campaign was “jolted by a tug-of-war between the candidate and his advisors over the direction and tone of his television ads.”

Rollins was so upset that he skipped the convention, although a car accident Wednesday night left him with a concussion and a valid excuse.

Insiders say that Rollins got mad because Simon--at his wife Cindy’s behest--deleted this line from a new ad: “I’m not perfect.”

Rollins and ad-maker Larry McCarthy--two political veterans with many victories to their credit--theorized that the line would show Simon’s humility and manfully acknowledge past missteps. But Cindy Simon objected to her husband’s conceding any imperfection.

The two gurus and Herrington also got irked at Russo for not fighting for the ad. But there’s much more to it than that. The episode illustrates a widening rift between Russo and Herrington, who haven’t gotten along in weeks.

In fact, insiders say, Rollins recently replaced Russo as the No. 1 strategist. Russo denies it.

Whatever. As one delegate--former Lafayette Mayor Thomas Cleveland--put it while discussing the party and campaign squabbles: “This is the kind of intense fighting that losers do--like losing athletic teams.

“We have to act like winners.”

Stu Spencer--retired guru of gurus--told me last week: “The party has got to forget this stuff about ‘I’d rather be right than win.’ The mind-set has got to be pragmatic.”

The GOP does seem to be moving in that direction, slowly. Increasing numbers of grass-roots activists want to dump the party’s antiabortion platform plank.

“It’s a divisive issue that’s politicized on both sides,” notes farmer Maltby.

Some GOP leaders, in fact, privately advocate tearing up the state party platform entirely and never writing another. One national party platform is enough, they say. The goal should be to elect Republicans, not impose a religious faith.

Also, many note, rather than pummeling the president’s pal, the state chairman should be drubbing Democrats--especially at a Republican convention.

But biannual conventions are just wasteful dens of potential trouble. Democrats long ago figured that out too.