Top RNC aide quits, blasts Michael Steele

Some people might ask why this article from Politico is posted because conservatives have a tendency to not believe Politico, but in the time I have been reading their site, have never been steered wrong by Jonathan Martin whose articles are clear, concise, and rely on facts.

There is more that can be added to this article about RNC. It has had problems for years with hiring sons and daughters of big donors to work elections who most don't have a clue which you find out when they come in your state for a special election. They are not bashful about saying how things need to be run either. That has been a problem for years that is annoying but you can work around.

Michael Steele is another whole deal starting with a lot of his gaffes at the beginning. Then we had the problem with some of his young aides charging the RNC for a strip club and it has been downhill for months. Steele spends a lot of money on his travel. How about holding the RNC Winter Meetings in Hawaii. State Parties needed the money for their campaigns not spent on that type of travel. He travels first class, stays in the best hotel suites, and uses limos to get around when visiting.

They spent way too much on special elections for Congress and had a poor track record.  Rules need to be put in place how much a Chairman can spend on a special election without Committee approval. 

Then he spent over $250,000 for Sarah Palin's legal expenses so she would do some fundraising for the RNC and be with him on some of the stops on his Stop Pelosi Bus Tour which wasted major bucks when the State Parties needed help for GOTV. Why did he spend that money on Palin's lawyers?

When they held the Orlando rally, people turned out to see Marco Rubio but he only got to speak for six minutes while Palin spoke for 30 minutes. Palin's Sarah PAC just came in raising over $4M with over $1M on hand but only gave a little over 5% to candidates and 68% to expenses. A lot of that was for her family like $250 for food at a Yankee game. Food is expensive at games but $250? Not likely on normal food for baseball games.

Why did Steele insist on having Palin and in exchange paid $250,000 of legal bills which were her responsibility -- she is now a millionaire.

Vowed the day I heard that to never donate another penny to RNC until it was cleaned up and Steele no longer Chair. My not donating didn't stop all the snail mail fundraising. Maddest I got was the notice to go pick up an Express Mail package.  After going to the post office, discovered it was a fundraising letter from the RNC with an Express Mail envelop to send back my contribution. What a waste of money. Coming in second is the $1 they sent donors to send back a donation -- kept the dollar like millions of others.

Was notified by RNC that a donation made during the Scott Brown campaign in early January showed the credit card being stolen. This was in April when they tried to run it through the system, but the card was stolen and replaced in late January.  The small donation made to RNC was made the first part of January  and had cleared the next day. Once a month I would get an email and a letter that I needed to contact them. Sent back the transaction number from the checking account but no one ever replied. In August I finally talked to a 'real' person not an answering machine who said there was no problem as the first one went through and she didn't know why they tried to send it through again.

Went from being a monthly donor to now won't donate one penny until they clean out the place starting with the Chair. Don't contribute to have the Chair running around the Countryside in a bus when the states needed the money. Fortunately Oklahoma was one of the states where we had a Governor's race so we had money.

Very mismanaged organization starting at the top and extremely happy to see Collins tell it like it is. For those of you that don't want Republican dirty laundry aired, you have come to the wrong place. We may even go after Republicans harder because we expect more out of them. We don't like grand standers or people that spin on either side.

It is time to clean up the RNC once and for all and then you will see donations start back up. Until then, forget it!

Top RNC aide quits, blasts Michael Steele
By JONATHAN MARTIN | 11/16/10 1:06 PM EST

Republican National Committee political director Gentry Collins resigned from his post Tuesday morning with a stinging indictment of Chairman Michael Steele’s two-year tenure at the committee.

In a four-page letter to Steele and the RNC’s executive committee obtained by POLITICO, Collins lays out inside details, previously only whispered, about the disorganization that plagues the party. He asserts that the RNC’s financial shortcomings limited GOP gains this year and reveals that the committee is deeply in debt entering the 2012 presidential election cycle.
“In the previous two non-presidential cycles, the RNC carried over $4.8 million and $3.1 million respectively in cash reserve balances into the presidential cycles,” Collins writes, underlining his words for emphasis. “In stark contrast, we enter the 2012 presidential cycle with 100% of the RNC’s $15 million in lines of credit tapped out, and unpaid bills likely to add millions to that debt.”

The short version of the RNC's 2010 troubles as described by Collins: The committee couldn’t afford to run an independent expenditure ad campaign on behalf of their candidates, didn’t fund a paid voter turnout operation for Senate and gubernatorial races, left its vaunted 72-Hour turnout program effectively unfunded, offered only a fraction of the direct-to-candidate financial contributions they made four years ago and dramatically scaled back its support of state parties.

Steele has not indicated whether he will seek another term at the helm of the committee and an array of Republicans are already maneuvering to ensure that he does not win re-election in the event he runs. The depth of the party’s problems his political director reveals is likely to make it considerably more difficult for the embattled chairman if he does pursue a second term.

That’s in part because Collins is not one of the committee’s persistent Steele critics but a respected operative and senior staffer inside the RNC building who was given authority over the $15 million line of credit the party took out this fall. In addition to the normal duties of his job, Collins spent much of the summer and fall quietly travelling the country and meeting with major donors in an effort to boost the party’s lackluster fundraising. It was a highly unusual task for a political director and, coupled with his primary job responsibilities, effectively made the Iowa native the operational head of the party.

The letter is even more damaging because the aide doesn’t just lay out a bill of particulars about the troubled committee but specifically rebuts the pushback deployed by Steele to defend his tenure.

Alluding to the chairman’s oft-cited explanation about the RNC’s financial difficulties this year, for example, Collins writes that the party’s “low cash-on-hand figures are not simply the result of early spending or transfers to state parties.”

Excerpt: Read more: Politico