Is There Still A Statewide Republican Party In California?

Friday the Republicans' annual 3-day neo-fascist conclave begins at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in DC. Featured speakers include a grab bag of some of the craziest lunatics on the fringes of the far right, from extremist current and former elected officials like Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, David Brat, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, to random freaks-with-a-following like Glenn Beck, Mat Staver, Ollie North, William Boykin, E.W. Jackson, Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, Gary Bauer, and some Duggars and Duck Dynasts. The meeting of the American neo-fascist movement is bound to get a lot more attention than the pathetic Republican Party convention last weekend in Los Angeles. Both conventions were premised on making some hay around an out of place Rand Paul.

The takeaway from the puny Republican convention in L.A., though, was all about the party's mind-boggling dysfunction, disunity and self-loathing. Every single GOP careerist is seeking to step on anyone else if it will help create the illusion they have disassociated themselves from the GOP and the other candidates. Gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari was treated like garbage, from the planning sessions right through the end of the whole awful affair. Tow of his statewide running mates refused to endorse him and one said he'd probably vote for Democrat Jerry Brown. And that was at the Republican Party convention! No one wants to touch the biggest point of his toxic résumé, his shameful role in the horrifying TARP bailout.

The gathering opened on a sour note Friday, when the evening's keynote speaker, state controller candidate Ashley Swearengin, told reporters she was still mulling whether to vote for Kashkari or Brown. "I'm looking at the two candidates like other Californians are," she said.

And Pete Peterson, the Republican running for secretary of state, said in an interview that he was not endorsing Kashkari-- or anyone else on the statewide ballot-- and did not plan to vote a straight party ticket.

The extraordinary display of disunity led Ron Nehring, a former state Republican chairman and underdog candidate for lieutenant governor, to vent his fury in a profanity-tinged email to party brass just before midnight Friday, after news organizations began reporting the dust-up.

"This does NOT help the party, and it distracts from the efforts made to convey a positive theme," Nehring wrote. "The coverage is not of a party expanding its reach. It's about a party that isn't unified because its candidates can't get it together and get on the same page."

Party leaders played down the disagreement. "A lot is being made out of a few tea leaves there," said state party vice chair Harmeet Dhillon.

But for both Swearengin and Peterson, distance from the party could prove to be an asset in a state that has largely favored Democrats for two decades.

Swearengin, the mayor of Fresno, said California "needs some independence when it comes to watching the treasury."

Swearengin has rebuffed Kashkari's efforts to campaign together and broken with him on his signature issue, the bullet train that Brown wants to build between Los Angeles and San Francisco. She supports the project as an economic boost for the Central Valley; Kashkari calls it "the crazy train."

The friction is also partly personal: Kashkari irked Swearengin by not giving her advance warning that he was going to spend a week posing as a homeless man in Fresno in an effort to spotlight poverty and joblessness on Brown's watch.

For his part, Peterson said he was declining to publicly back Kashkari because a secretary of state needs to run state elections in a nonpartisan fashion. He also suggested that Republicans should reclaim the progressive reform traditions of the Theodore Roosevelt era.

"I'm not running for a lifeboat," he said.

But befitting tradition, the convention, at a hotel near LAX, was dominated by the party's conservative wing. A tea party caucus ran a $10-a-ticket raffle for a shotgun. A person in a pink pig costume walked the corridors with a "No More Environmental Pork" sign in protest of Proposition 1, a $7.5-billion water bond measure.

…[P]arty leaders omitted Kashkari from a flier promoting the convention. It featured photos of Swearengin, Paul and U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). McCarthy was the headline speaker Saturday night; Kashkari was relegated to lower-profile proceedings Sunday morning.

"Hopefully you won't be too hung over, and you'll get up in the morning and come," Kashkari told a roomful of volunteers Saturday.

But the conflict among candidates marred the weekend. In his email, Nehring said it was impossible "to elevate the perception of the party while diminishing its top of the ticket."

"The party and its candidates rise together," he wrote. "Or in today's coverage, fall together."

Deigning to mention the non-event for the Washington Post, Philip Bump said the theme of the whole shebang was how to curtail the party's evaporation in the state. "Fifteen years ago, 35 percent of registered voters were Republican. Today, 28 percent are." With all the talk about how Republican racists can no longer win statewide elections, what goes unsaid is the danger some of the congressmen are in-- at least in a post-Steve Israel environment-- from the continuing deterioration of the Republican brand. Although Duncan Hunter, Doug LaMalfa, Tom McClintock, Paulk Cook, Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes, and probably Ken Calvert are in red enough/white enough districts to be safe for at least another few cycles, a competent DCCC chairman would have already put a multi-cycle plan together to defeat whichever Republican takes over for McKeon, as well as in swing districts represented by out-of-step politicians David Valadao (D+2), Jeff Denham (R+1), Darrell Issa (R+4), and Ed Royce (R+5) and soon after, Dana Rohrabacher (R+7) and Mimi Walters (R+7). Obama beat McCain in Issa's district, McKeon's district, Valadao's district (where he also beat Romney, 55-44%), and Denham's district (another one where he also beat Romney, 51-47%). It's only the sheer incompetence and corruption of Steve Israel and his floundering DCCC that is keeping these Republicans in office for another term-- despite the top of the state ticket.

By the way, Kashkari, who has already spent $2 million on his vanity campaign, wasn't even given a prime time speaking slot, speaking during the ill-attended hangover session on Sunday morning. And among other Republicans lining up to announce they would not endorse him, has the teabagger who opposed him in the primary, crackpot state Senator Tim Donnelly, a notorious racist: