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, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.
Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off 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 last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times.
The national committee yesterday confirmed the firings that took place more than a week ago, but denied that the move was motivated by declining donor response to phone solicitations.
"The phone-bank employees were terminated," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail in response to questions sent by The Times. "This was not an easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The RNC was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain viable."
Fired employees acknowledged that the committee's phone equipment was outdated, but said a sharp drop-off in donations "probably" hastened the end of the RNC's in-house phone-bank operation.
"Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by the end of 2007," said one fired phone bank solicitor who asked not to be identified.
There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call "amnesty" for illegal aliens.
"Everyone 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 the former employee.
The RNC spokeswoman denied that the committee has seen any drop-off in contributions.
"Any assertion that overall donations have gone down is patently false," Miss Schmitt said. "We continue to out raise our Democrat counterpart by a substantive amount (nearly double)."
So what happened here? Back in 2006, the Republican Party decided to concentrate on immigration reform. The Republicans thought that if they could create a simple immigration reform package, they could sell that legislative package to the rapidly-growing Hispanic vote. Therein lies the problem. First, immigration reform is not going to be simple, but rather complicated. How do you create an amnesty program for long-term illegal aliens? How do you reform the border control? Guest worker programs? Or even the current problem of companies hiring illegal aliens? Building a 700-mile fence across the 2000-mile US-Mexican border? But the bigger problem for the Republicans is that as they started working on this immigration reform bill, it resulted in huge protests and counter-protests on the immigration bill H.R. 4437. I don't think the Republicans ever anticipated the level of controversy and protests when they started this immigration reform during a midterm election year of 2006. Which brings us to this little comment by a former employee, "Everyone 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," The Republicans angered their small-doner base. This base opposes any form of an amnesty program for long-term illegal aliens, and they have been making their anger known to the Republican Party by not just complaining to the phone-bank employees, but also not contributing to the GOP. This anger with the small doner base for the Republican Party contradicts the Republican Party's desire to court the Hispanic vote. If you go over to The Free Republic, you can read the raw anger of the comments on this story.
And how is the Republican Party responding to this anger? They fired their entire phone-banking staff for soliciting the grass-roots doners. In a sense, the Republicans are abandoning the fundraising for their small-doner base, and shifting their attention to the wealthy doners, business and corporate donations. The Republican Party has now shown itself to be the party of corporations.
No comments:
Post a Comment