The California Republican Party has fallen so low right now that it is nearly six feet under. Can a new leadership step up and do it right, can they feed and energize the masses?
I am one of the disappointed grass roots volunteers. I did not sit on my keester through this past election season. I worked and I am more than disheartened with the avoidable election results.
Outgoing CAGOP Chairman Jim Brulte assumed the helm of a CAGOP that was essentially bankrupt a few years ago. He did what he had to do to bring in much needed funds that allowed continuing operations.
However, the CAGOP in general just blew it with the 2018 elections. Shame on us (our many expert analysts and prognosticators simply dropped the ball here – no excuses) for not even knowing about or understanding how to exploit vote harvesting laws which Gerry Brown & Co. legalized in 2016, and what the Democrats shrewdly and successfully applied to bury our candidates. Shame. Shame. Shame on us. Some of us need to look into a mirror to see our worst enemies. If we workers knew of this new opportunity, many of us could have grabbed that brass ring and ran with it.
Count on the Democrats to get something else in place for the 2020 elections. Our many expert analysts need to get on the ball to ferret out what legal shenanigans and slyness will emerge so that we can counter and/or exploit it/them.
"We need to do more than “get back to basics” with more hot air palaver and pontification. We need to get real, get serious to get up to speed and utilize the present and emerging tools, laws, and rules available to us, to use technology, and much more ... James E. Horn
We need to do more than “get back to basics” with more hot air palaver and pontification. We need to get real, get serious to get up to speed and utilize the present and emerging tools, laws, and rules available to us, to use technology, and much more.
It seems that whenever I go to a Republican activity or event and look around, about 90% of the faces I see are Occidental, in a state where Occidentals are a minority. That, boys and girls, is a serious impairment that any new leadership must (an imperative) address. When the GOP are perceived to be racist (and sometimes blithely demonstrate so) we create a painful anti-GOP animus that results in what we just experienced. These not so subtle dinosaurs within the GOP need to shape up or ship out.
Dinesh D’Souza has thoroughly researched and written great, informative and educational books, and made movies that paved the way for us to appropriately paint the Democrats as the genuine bigots and racists that they really are - and we have obviously ignored those valuable lessons. Shame. Shame.
I’ve been receiving literature from people interested in CAGOP leadership positions discussing what needs to be done to fix things – some of it a lot of same-old, same-old, and same-old again platitudes, statistics, and palaver.
We had the likes of so-called Republicans Bert Boeckmann, Meg Whitman, and Richard Riordan donating to and backing Democrats like Villaraigosa for governor. WTH?
We had a wonderful, talented, energetic candidate for governor with Travis Allen and rejected him to pick a perennial loser. WTH?
I don’t know if it’s statewide, but in my part of the state, we had GOP Central Committee Chairmen who backed unsuitable candidates, and failed to back viable candidates. In Riverside County, the Republican Chairman (himself a mayor who voted for tax increases in his city) who did little to actively seek out, encourage, promote, and rally support for viable candidates for office thus (willfully?) enabling Democrats to take those important seats.
Is it any wonder that clubs with thousands of dedicated Republican grassroots members who work hard throughout the process are throwing up their hands and walking away from a GOP that they feel betrays them?
The grass roots are NOT looking to repeat with a CAGOP that leaves them high and dry. A new leadership will face a challenge to regain the trust and confidence of we-the-rank-and-file.
That new leadership has to be savvy, innovative, and lead with intelligence and boldness, and to develop/adopt new tactics and approaches that will work. Borrowing from winners or adopting winning tactics such as the Democrats have successfully used won’t hurt. We can – we must learn to fight fire with fire in order to win. Studying Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and adopting some of those workable tactics can be a useful key to prevailing.
We have lofty and often repeated goals about principles, education, low taxes, and so forth, goals that because of the recent disaster are just fine, but aren’t working just now.
We need to establish as a first goal, a strategy for winning elections be it reciprocally down and dirty or lofty, and to work smart with our coalition partners to get them to share this one goal – to just win. Until we win the hearts and minds of voters to win elections by any means, little else matters.
I am prepared to move forward with an energetic, practical leadership team determined to do what it takes.
James E. Horn is a Retired American Diplomat
He is an activist, a writer, and a speaker who knows his subject
He can be reached at james@portervillepost.com
