OC GOP Endorsement Committee Update

For the last few nights, the OC GOP endorsement process has been in full swing for local "non partisan" races(as if there ever was such a thing as a non partisan race). The committee has been holding court vetting many different candidates for city councils, OC Treasurer, school boards, and water boards. Suffice to say that the new process that we have developed seems to be working out well, although there will always be room for improvements.

This term the endorsement committee members are Mark Bucher, Deborah Pauly, Bruce Whitaker, Craig Alexander, Kristine Alonzo, and Mary Young.

This new endorsement process has been hard for some members and candidates to accept. It gets uncomfortable sometimes pitting one Republican against another. I totally understand that, but we need to properly vet these candidates on their track record and their beliefs or else our party brand will not regain believability and credibility as it relates to our stated principles in the party platform. In some cases it pits long time friends & relationships against each other. I for one am for this new process. I believe it is fair and lets the committee really vet our candidates though the questionnaire and direct questioning on their views. I have already had some candidates that I wanted to see get endorsed get shot down. It is what it is.

So far we have had two rounds of early endorsements and two nights of endorsement committee meetings. Regarding early endorsements, each Central Committee member may pull any candidate up for early endorsement off the list and have a separate debate on them. It's happened three or four times each of the two nights. I happened to pull San Clemente City Councilman Joe Anderson off the list this past Monday night for a separate debate. Councilman Anderson had some votes that I wanted to discuss with him. I used a great local website called Liberty First to look through his voting record. H/T to Chris Emami who did a great job researching voting records of these elected officials on our city councils. A few votes really stood out to me. He voted to ban feeding pigeons on the pier, voted to ban walking your dog in public, and he had voted to raise fees on some things. Excuse me, but why can't I feed some damn pigeons and walk my dog when I get home from work? Who the hell does this guy think he is. Ridiculous. I wanted to publicly shame this elected official to let others know in the future that when you start voting against my simple liberties, there will be repercussions and you will not get our endorsement.

The last two nights of the actual endorsement committee meetings has been very interesting. There was a knock down drag out fight between Shari Fredinrich and Keith Rodenhuis for OC Treasurer. Shari won the 3 to 2 vote with one abstention(Mary Young). Shari was blocked of an endorsement by us before the June primary and will likely get blocked again at the full committee. Sup. Moorlach is really pushing hard for Shari. At one point last weekend at CRP I asked John why he was making such a hard push for her when he was the one that gave us Sheriff Hutchens. I got the evil stare after that exchange. I believe Keith is going to win and he is going to do a great job and I support him.

The other big contentious debate was for Orange Mayor. This pitted two friends, Carolyn Cavecche and Jon Dimitru against one another. The first words out of Carolyn's mouth were that she was sorry for her pension spiking votes and later more apologies for supporting local Democrats Jordan Brandman and Tita Smith. I spoke in favor of Jon Dimitru and also pointed out to Carolyn that "it is real easy to come before this body and apologize for bad votes when you're hoping to get our party's coveted endorsement, but I guess it has been hard for you to do the right thing when no one is watching". With that, the committee voted for Jon 4 to 2. I think he has a great chance to get the full endorsement in a few weeks.

The last thing I wanna talk about is what happened Tuesday night regarding Irvine City Council candidate Lynn Schott. There is a lot of back story to this, so I will to run through what happened last night with a measured tone because I am extremely irritated at what happened. First I want to say that Lynn is a good candidate and she is a fighter. She and Jeff Lalloway are exactly what's needed here in Irvine. I spoke in favor of Lynn's endorsement as well as newly minted 70th District GOP nominee Don Wagner. So she is sailing right along until Mark Bucher and Mary Young got their chance to question her. They proceeded to grill Lynn on what happened at the past January Central Committee meeting...also known as the night Scott Baugh gave his big speech. A lot of Tea Party types had rented a room next door to the meeting because they were very mad at the leadership of the party establishment, which BTW is a very legitimate concern and political position to hold. The room was filled with pictures and caricatures of some of these leaders as well as holding a mini town hall type of event to let people angry with the local Republican Party get an earful. So back to the meeting....Mark and Mary(both on the current Exec Comm) were obviously trying to extract a pound of flesh out of Lynn because she along with I was in this meeting listening to all these fine patriots and their concerns about the direction of the party. So instead of vetting Lynn's qualifications for the GOP endorsement, they turned their questioning into a personal attack and inquisition on why Lynn attended this meeting. Excuse me guys, can we talk about beating Larry Agran? WTF! Get your personal agendas outta here. You're obviously bitter because of the almost 40% turnover in the last Central Committee elections. You wanna know why this happened? Just look at your behavior Tuesday night. That's why you lost big because people were fed up with the direction of the party and voted for a massive change in the makeup of the overall committee. In the end though we had the last laugh as Mark Bucher just made a complete idiot out of himself and Lynn held her composure well. The other members of the committee saw through his bullshit personal agenda and voted to endorse Lynn 5 to 1. I hope to god Mark trys to make an issue at the next regular Central Committee meeting so he can be exposed for all to see.