Tom Fuentes At The IRC

These are my own personal opinions. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the IRC or its members(but they should...LOL)

Tonight our Irvine Republican Council had the pleasure to host former OC GOP Party chairmen, the Honorable Tom Fuentes.

Mr. Fuentes talked to us about his lifetime of work for the Republican Party. He touched on a couple of different issues. He wanted everyone in the room to introduce themselves and give one word about what he should talk about. The issues ranged from leadership, endorsement process, The New Majority, Illegal Immigration, party philosophy, Irvine Elections, motivating voters, Arnold, and a few others. Recently he was appointed by Speaker Hastert to a commission on election integrity. He spoke of his work monitoring elections down in Nicaragua over the years. He then shifted gears and spoke about Arnold and the base of the party's lack of enthusiasm for the governor. He voted for Tom McClintock he said. He cracked back on the "tea & crumpets"(my words) element(read as the New Majority) of the party and spoke of his disdain about how groups like they, have corrupted the political process with their large campaign donations. All they want to do is write big checks and get their picture taken with the governor. He also blasted them for funding the latest registration scandal in Central OC. He says the party needs to get back to clean registrations by people talking to their neighbors instead of hired guns trying to get any warm body it can to sign. We saw what happened with that program. It gave the party a black eye. Thanks again NM. It was classic Tom Fuentes. He believes as I and most other party activists, that the volunteers of the party are the most important thing in winning campaigns. He thinks that this is going to be a bruising election and not a cake walk for Arnold like a lot of people think. As far as Irvine goes, he's disappointed that Republicans in Irvine haven't been able to get our act together and vote the Agran machine out of office. He thinks the alliance between Irvine's largest land owner(The Irvine Company)and Larry Agran is an "unholy" one. The one thing that I was disappointed to hear from him though was his support of Bush's immigration amnesty plan. He thinks we need to be inclusive of Latinos(no problem Tom, just tell them not to break our laws and to assimilate into our melting pot). I wanted to follow up with a few more questions about this issue, but I bit my tongue.

I also want to comment on who has pulled papers so far for city council and mayor. This is usually a cat & mouse type of thing and this year seems to be no different. All the players of the "unholy alliance" have pulled their papers according to the Register. That would be Larry "I am not a crook" Agran, Beth "I'm always befuddled" Krom, and Sukkee "Larry says jump and I ask how high" Kang. As far as the good side, Steven Choi has pulled papers for mayor and Christina Shea has pulled papers for mayor and city council I'm told. Former candidate Mitch Goldstone has also pulled papers for council. Mitch used to be an Agran ally, but he has seen the light and he has been ripping Larry constantly the last few years. I don't know who the third person from our preferred list of candidates is going to be(I'm out of the loop on this), but if we don't pick anyone else, I will have no problem supporting a Mitch Goldstone or a Chris Mears. As long as getting Irvine back to honest government is the focus, I really don't care if the third member of our team has an (I) or (D) by their name. I hope we can get a good strong Republican as the third, but if not then the two guys I mentioned would be fine for me.