Palm Springs weekend

Palm Springs, Calif. Weeks before the California Republican Convention September 15-17, State Party Chairman John McGraw admonished party activists not to attend the conclave if they were involved in a major campaign, Prior to. that, McGraw had even suggested canceling the second of the state party's two-a-year conventions, arguing that it would take workers away from key fall campaigns for three crucial days with less than eight weeks to go before election day.

That proposal went nowhere, however, since Golden State Republican activists love their conventions and would be devastated and demoralized were either the February session in the northern part of the state or the fall session in the south ever to be scotched.

So more than 700 conventioneers packed the Wyndham Hotel in Palm Springs and braved three days of 10°ree-plus heat in the California desert. There were some subtle but significant differences between this convention and the 11 previous sessions t had covered. For example, last year liberal GOPers staged a rump convention and wore Abort McGraw" buttons to signal their dislike of the conservative chairman. This time, they downplayed intraparty differences and such McGraw-haters as Bob Larkin of the Congress of California Republicans mingled freely with their conservative counterparts for the first time. Also, reporters who cover conventions, such as Los Angeles radio commentator Hugh Hewitt, Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle, and your correspondent, were put to work on a well-attended panel "Now I Learned to Love the Media" (My fellow correspondent John Jacobs of the Sacramento Bee, from whom I had learned so much at conventions past, who was to have been on the panel, unfortunately died earlier this year at age 49.)

But, as is inevitable at California GOP conventions, hot political news flowed as freely as the wine donated by merchants from the Napa Valley.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Sep 29, 2000
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