By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — One of the mighty “might have beens” is the question of how much further the Republican Party could have advanced the well-being of this nation if the elite GOP establishment worked cooperatively with its energized grassroots rather than fighting and even betraying them as a matter of course.
On voting day, Republicans increasingly conquer the Democrats. Then GOP leaders lie down and moan they dare not act while Barack Obama’s Democrat Party dances all over them.
The elites know what the voters want because that’s what the GOP promises to deliver. Once the elections are won, though, the Mitch McConnells, Paul Ryans, and that bunch have fainting fits. Witness the bad way this worked out with the resignation last fall of failed House Speaker John Boehner.
Establishment icon Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) may be as good a specimen of the bunch as can be had. “Mavericky moderate” McCain currently is fighting to win a sixth straight term in the Senate, but his path isn’t strewn with rose petals.
In January of this new year, McCain paid the price of being repudiated by GOP ground troops here, then his desperate strategy blocked further expression of party workers’ frustration. Why try to conciliate the alienated grassroots when he can try to laugh them off? It’s the same dangerous recipe the national GOP cooks up to thwart the party base from Atlantic to Pacific.
Precinct committeemen (PCs) in Arizona’s dominant Maricopa County — Phoenix is the county seat — overwhelmingly voted in favor of an “Anyone But McCain” resolution at their annual meeting on January 16. However, a similar bid was blocked from a vote the following weekend at the Arizona state committeemen’s January 23 annual gathering.
It’s the McCain way, and the establishment’s, both in Arizona and nationally. Not trying to accommodate the dominant ground troops needed for the battles, but trying to defy and dispose of them. As usual, McCain attended neither of these meetings.
Arizona conservative GOP campaign consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer in a January 31 email:
“As near as I can tell, it is just a continuation of the battle between McCain and his allies, versus the conservatives in the Arizona Republican Party. McCain says these fights don’t matter to him, then his folks put together PACs to raise and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect PCs and defeat people they consider disloyal to McCain.
“Naturally the party takes great offense at that,” Querard continued. “No other member of our federal delegation makes targets of the men and women who are working in the trenches to elect Republicans. So the battle rages on.”
Asked by The Wanderer who benefits, Querard replied, “No one benefits, but acting in self-defense doesn’t require a profit motive.”
Two winters ago, in 2014, some Arizona counties’ GOP precinct committeemen including Maricopa’s, as well as Arizona state committeemen, censured McCain for being untrue to the Republican Party platform.
McCain was deeply embarrassed by this, but instead of mending his ways, he set out to replace his critics in the day-to-day Arizona party machinery with more of his own people. Not a good idea, and not effective enough.
His surviving critics said McCain hadn’t returned to GOP platform values since the 2014 censures, so they offered their “Anyone But McCain” resolution in early 2016 to Maricopa County committeemen. It passed overwhelmingly on January 16 at their Phoenix gathering, 921 to 582.
(See the January 28, 2016, hardcopy issue of The Wanderer, p. 3, “Reflecting nation’s unrest, precinct workers tell McCain it’s time to quit.”)
However, after GOP activists gathered enough signatures to bring the question to the floor at the state committeemen’s meeting in Tempe the following weekend, on January 23, the parliamentarian said this was out of order, disallowing a vote there.
The state’s largest daily paper, the strongly pro-McCain Arizona Republic, inaccurately headlined its January 23 online report, “Arizona Republican Party rejects resolutions against McCain, chairman.”
(The “chairman” in the headline, state GOP leader Robert Graham, had come to be viewed as serving McCain’s interests.)
The Republic story began, “The Arizona Republican Party opposed another attempt to rebuke U.S. Sen. John McCain at its annual meeting on Saturday.”
A reader rebuked the newspaper online that the resolutions weren’t even allowed to come to a vote.
“Supporters of the McCain and Graham resolutions needed 129 signatures from state committeemen to bring the resolution to the floor for a vote by the full body,” the Republic reported. “They had 220 signatures against McCain and 130 against Graham.”
The conservative “Seeing Red AZ” blog reported on January 24 that when a conservative GOP party officer at the state meeting started to speak against RINOs in the party, her mic was cut off.
“This was a strong indication how the censure resolutions would have fared, had Graham’s parliamentarian allowed them to be heard,” Seeing Red AZ commented.
Rejection of RINOs is suppressed by the elite when possible rather than given a hearing. It’s a losing strategy, but the elite keep on trying to play by their failing rules.
People Power
Rob Haney recalled for The Wanderer that he became involved in Republican activism in Arizona in this new century because of the damaging dominance by the GOP establishment, including its often being pro-abortion.
The abortion allegiance might not have been surprising, given that Republican leadership often could be identified as springing from the country-club set, which can equate with Planned Parenthood support, plus the fact that the wife of national conservative champion Barry Goldwater, Peggy, was a founder in the 1930s of the PP organization located here.
Today it might seem unthinkable that a prominent Republican with national aspirations would campaign as being strongly pro-abortion. Activists across the nation like Haney and their people power probably can be thanked for having forced the GOP in a different direction.
Haney went on to serve two terms as chairman of McCain’s own state legislative district — how McCain ground his teeth at that — then two terms as chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party before retiring. Haney continues to be an activist here.
He recalled that Arizona GOP headquarters used to have literature from the “WISH List,” a pro-abortion organization that was the GOP equivalent of the Democrats’ “EMILY’s List” raising money for pro-abortion candidates.
“I felt I had an obligation to expose how the Arizona GOP supported pro-abortion organizations such as the WISH List and Christine Todd Whitman’s pro-abortion organization, ‘It’s My Party Too’,” Haney said.
Whitman was a strong pro-abortionist and former Republican governor of New Jersey.
Some Arizona Republicans also sponsored meetings where prominent party members promoted WISH List, Haney said, adding: “Many of them voted for pro-abortion Democrat Janet Napolitano over pro-life Republican Matt Salmon, resulting in Napolitano’s (narrow) election to governor” of the state in 2002.
“McCain was listed as on the board of directors for It’s My Party Too. He quickly had his name removed once I exposed him,” Haney told The Wanderer. “Likewise, the WISH List pamphlets were removed from the Arizona GOP racks once I published that bit of news. . . . And the WISH List meetings and the organization soon disappeared from the Arizona scene. These . . . have now morphed into less conspicuous organizations.”
As a U.S. senator, McCain hasn’t seemed very enthusiastic with the pro-life issue, but at least he learned he can’t afford to hold to the other side politically.
As for the two recent Arizona GOP meetings where an anti-McCain resolution passed in one but was forbidden to be voted on at the other, Haney said in an email that each meeting had a resolutions committee “controlled by McCain operatives. Therefore, neither committee would allow the resolution out of committee.
“This forced those PCs submitting the resolution to gather hundreds of signatures…before the start of the meeting in order to validate it and bring it forward from the floor at the convention,” he said.
“We had a team of 30-plus working from 6 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. at each convention to gather these signatures. The parliamentarian at the county meeting was fair and allowed the resolution to be voted upon. . . . That parliamentarian was scheduled to work the state meeting but was fired by (state party chairman) Graham, probably because he allowed the (county) vote, and replaced by the parliamentarian who ruled as Graham wanted” at the state meeting.
Asked why he thinks the establishment fights so hard against heeding its own grassroots members, Haney replied: “The establishment Republicans consist of the chambers of commerce members who financially support the RINO candidates for office. The chambers have a symbiotic relationship with the RINOs, just as the unions have a symbiotic relationship with the Democrat politicians, particularly in the cities.
“Money, support, and workers are funneled to the candidates’ campaigns from the unions and chambers, and the candidates pass the legislation favored by the unions and chambers,” he said.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress