By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — It seemed plain that the pro-life cause was welcome at the Arizona Republican Party’s gathering here to elect its state leadership for the next two years, but whether John McCain was influential in calling the shots over choosing officers was a subject for dispute.
These days, pro-lifers are recognized as an essential element of the winning GOP coalition. However, some opinions differed on whether McCain has been marginalized in leadership politics or still played a strong role from behind the scenes in tailoring the top level of the Grand Canyon State’s GOP.
McCain knows how unpopular his “mavericky” ways have been with party committeemen here — who officially censured him in recent years for being untrue to the GOP’s platform principles. However, the Tea Party philosophy of activist conservatism never has been his cup of tea. Nor has a strong pro-life position.
State party chairman Robert Graham, retiring after two terms, noted to the assembled GOP committeemen at their January 28 meeting that new President Donald Trump issued an executive order cutting off taxpayer funding for international abortion groups. Graham admiringly exclaimed, “Man!” as committeemen applauded.
Getting to know Trump personally “has blessed my life,” Graham said.
Graham’s 13-year-daughter, Faith, who apparently has a bright future as a polished public speaker, had just told the audience why she likes Trump. One of her reasons was protecting “the life of the unborn.”
“There’s love and there’s humanity in Mr. Trump,” Robert Graham said, describing the determined billionaire as “a citizen servant leader.”
Arizona Fourth District Cong. Paul Gosar was cheered by the crowd when he mentioned the previous day’s March for Life in Washington, D.C. Gosar is a Catholic conservative and dentist.
Andy Biggs, the state’s new Fifth District conservative congressman, was applauded when he said, “I had the privilege yesterday to stand on that stage for the March for Life” in the nation’s capital.
Saying he had looked out at “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people” at the march, Biggs added, “I am grateful to be living in a pro-life America. God bless a pro-life America.”
The state’s most populous county, Maricopa, where Phoenix is county seat, elected its county Republican leadership two weeks earlier, on January 14.
The race for new state chairman came down to two men — Jonathan Lines, the state party’s treasurer, who foes said was McCain’s preferred candidate, and Jim O’Connor, whose campaign literature attacked “shadow control by the Establishment” and “the back room.” One of his handouts said, “Jim is the actual grassroots conservative, not an establishment pretender.”
Outside the meeting hall for this election, there were plentiful yard signs erected for Lines, but this writer didn’t see one for O’Connor.
The popular “Seeing Red AZ” conservative blog, which had declared O’Connor to be “the conservative candidate for Arizona GOP chairman,” was disappointed at Lines’ victory in the January 28 voting by state committeemen, winning narrowly, 596 to 562.
Headlining that this result means “more of the same” by the establishment, Seeing Red AZ wrote on January 29, “In a continuation of the establishment control of the Arizona Republican Party, Jonathan Lines follows in the footsteps of Robert Graham and his mentors John McCain and Jeff Flake.”
Flake, Arizona’s other U.S. senator, is pretty much an echo of McCain’s stands for open borders, the establishment, and distaste for Trump.
Graham, who often doesn’t sound like an echo of McCain, still seems careful not to get crossways with the state’s senior senator.
The blog added, “Although the well-qualified O’Connor was defeated, members of his team were victorious. (Gabriela) Saucedo Mercer was elected state GOP secretary and Robert Lettieri was elected party treasurer.”
Conservative Arizona political consultant Constantin Querard, sporting a Lines badge at the gathering, told The Wanderer that some conservatives are so used to getting into fights, they can’t be comfortable without one.
“The one major negative in the GOP race was the nonstop proliferation of ‘he’s a McCain guy’ lies,” Querard said. “Some in the party are so conditioned to the fight against Team McCain that they can’t comprehend a convention where there are no actual McCain candidates. As such, they readily buy into candidate A’s accusations that candidate B is the McCain guy.
“In truth, what we call the McCain folks are only important in races where conservatives divide their own vote and turn the McCain bloc into the swing vote,” he said. “It will probably be a few more years before conservatives realize that they’re dominant in Arizona GOP politics and that they can stop fighting shadows and ghosts.
“They have the numbers, they just need to learn how to govern. The best thing conservatives can do is to stop lying to each other about imaginary ‘McCain candidates’ as a tactic to literally scare up votes,” Querard said.
During the GOP meeting, it was announced that the Arizona Democratic Party had a smaller turnout as it held its own leadership election elsewhere the same day.
Querard commented: “It seems both the Democratic and Republican meetings featured hard-fought battles, but, as usual, Republican attendance was double the Democrats’, and the GOP came out of it with a better chairman.
“The Democrats re-elected the chairman who presided over their party’s 2016 losses and they can’t feel very good about their lack of quality statewide candidates. Republicans got a chairman who is capable of building on the party’s successes and taking advantage of the GOP’s deep bench,” he said.
However, Rob Haney, retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer that McCain’s influence was plain.
“Here are a few of the more salient points describing how McCain does significantly influence state committeemen,” Haney said, listing these bullet points:
— “It is common knowledge that McCain has spent much time and money in the past 15 years to depose conservative committeemen and replace them with liberals who would support him, as opposed to censure him;
— “One of his efforts was called ‘de-kookifying’ the Republican Party, during which one of his operatives described in the far-left Arizona Republic newspaper how liberals should contact her to learn how to replace conservative, kooky precinct committeemen;
— “The McCain-selected candidate for state chairman, Jonathan Lines, who was elected January 28, was recently pictured ensconced at a dinner table for four, with Senators McCain and Flake on each side of him. No self-respecting conservative would be caught dead at that table;
— “Arizona Congressmen (Matt) Salmon, Biggs, (Trent) Franks, and Gosar endorsed Lines for chairman, even though none of them lived in Lines’ congressional district. No congressman endorsed Lines’ opponent, Jim O’Connor. How’s that for influencing committeemen?”
(Although Salmon had been the Fifth District congressman, he stepped down last year, and Biggs was chosen in the November general election to replace him.)
— “The previous state chairman, Robert Graham, who also supported McCain, tried to have O’Connor and his District 23 committeemen disqualified from the election. It cost the district $20,000 in legal fees to fight the attempt;
— “Numerous articles have been published this past year in state blogs and papers detailing the influence McCain and his operatives have exercised over state committeemen who are also precinct committeemen.”
Moderate conservative Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey also spoke to the January 28 committeemen’s meeting to celebrate how successful the GOP was in November’s elections.
Like former party chairman Graham, Ducey has seemed cautious about getting crossways against McCain.
Ducey added that he wanted to thank former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for making the state “a better and safer place to live.” Describing Arpaio as “a cop’s cop,” Ducey drew applause when he urged that people let Arpaio know “how grateful you are to his service to our state.”
The 84-year-old Arpaio was defeated last November in his bid for a seventh consecutive term as sheriff of Arizona’s most populous county. Arpaio had been hounded by biased federal Judge G. Murray Snow and Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, while the open-borders Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily, amplified their assaults against the sheriff.
Although Ducey’s belated praise for Arpaio was nice, the Seeing Red AZ blog said, it would have been nicer “if he stepped forward with that warm endorsement before Election Day. We now have a George Soros-funded Democrat as Maricopa County sheriff.”
That sheriff, Paul Penzone, was the establishment choice to go soft on illegal immigration. The corrupt establishment burned with resentment for years against practicing Catholic Arpaio because of his opposition to lawbreaking border crossing.
Standing just outside the meeting hall, local pro-life activist Joe Perron told The Wanderer he was disappointed that Ducey didn’t mention the pro-life cause in his remarks, although Ducey is pro-life. “It’s got to be Number One on the list” of important causes, Perron said.
A Dangerous World
Two other interesting comments at the Republican committeemen’s meeting:
Arizona Cong. Martha McSally, whose Second Congressional District borders Mexico, said, “Those who live along the border are tired of the cartels” and the illicit movement through their areas.
As for the wider world and not only the border, McSally, a military veteran, said, “This is a very dangerous world, more than I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan said that during a five-hour window last November, a person could text a certain number to have a taxicab pick up his early ballot. “Not very good ballot security,” Reagan said.
An Arizona law had gone into effect against “ballot harvesting,” a person’s collection of multiple early ballots for unsecure delivery to a polling place, but that five-hour window of opportunity for liberals occurred as the fight to enforce the law went through the courts.
By coincidence, two days after the state committeemen’s meeting, a conservative writer who’d covered the March for Life in the nation’s capital was on the phone with Phoenix’s conservative Seth and Chris Show on KKNT Radio (960 AM).
The writer, Marjorie Jeffrey, expressed puzzlement that conservative, illegal-alien-troubled Arizona has mavericks McCain and Flake for its two U.S. senators.
Now there’s a story of political corruption she might want to look into.
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