RNC faces donor falloff, fires solicitors
Looks like the efforts of the Prez and other Republocrats to push for the the Kennedy-McCainiac National Border Abolition Act masquerading as “immigration reform” is having a real, and negative impact on the Republican base.
DUH!
The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors’ rebellion over President Bush’s immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned. Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee’s chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.
The “official” fig-leaf story to cover this is that the equipment is just too obsolete to maintain, and too expensive to replace. Hmmmm. One has to think that if there was a good return, the COI (cost of investment) would be readily recovered, but since this isn’t the case…one must look elsewhere:
Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans. “Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue,” said a fired phone bank employee who said the severance pay the RNC agreed to pay him was contingent on his not criticizing the national committee.
This must be the sort of thing they are getting these days:
A spokeswoman for the committee denied any drop-off in fundraising. “Any assertion that overall donations have gone down is patently false,” RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail yesterday in response to questions sent by The Times. “We continue to out-raise our Democrat counterpart by a substantive amount (nearly double).”
That is a very interesting statement to parse. OVERALL donations haven’t gone down…but there is more to the story:
Previous Republican donors have given RNC solicitors an earful about the proposed immigration measure. “We have not heard anyone in our donor calls who supported the president on immigration,” said a fired phone solicitor, who described himself as a Republican activist.
Putting these two assessments together, can one conclude that corporate/business contributions are SUPPORTING the cheap labor situation that results from the current near anarchy on the border? Where else could the difference be?
Also there is some evidence of (to quote Barney Fife: “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”) of either an astounding lack of situational awareness, or a stupendous effort to blow smoke into places where the sun NEVER shines.
“We write these comments up from each call, and give them to a supervisor who passes them on to the finance director or the national chairman,” he said. “But when I talked with the White House, the people there told me they got nothing but positive comments on the president’s immigration stand.”
There is also some collateral damage occurring beyond the RNC.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) both report having trouble raising money from the small donors who are the backbone of all the fundraising committees for both major parties.
It’ll be interesting to see if and how the GOP turns this around, or if the Grand Old Party goes the way of the Whigs who died out when they were too anti-slavery to please the South, and not abolitionist enough to get Northern support. The keywords to any such GOP revival HAVE to include: “BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CULTURE”.