If you're reading this it's probably because you called State Party headquarters and told me that you were so angry at what your Republican representatives are doing that you are leaving the Party. I asked you to take a look at this web page to see what effect your leaving would have on the Republican Party here in Arizona and whether that is what you would want.

It's simple, really. When you change your voter registration away from Republican, whether it's to Democrat or Independent or Green or whatever, you diminish the number of positions in the Party's grass-roots organization. If you've ever wondered where new candidates come from and where their campaign staff people come from, very often it's the Party's grass-roots organization. If you're saying to yourself "Yep, that's what I thought, I'm getting out.", please keep reading. In Arizona, over the last four years, the Republican grass-roots have been involved in a mini-revolution.

If you are truly a conservative, you believe strongly in a set of principles that include ideas like: individual responsibility, that the fruits of your own efforts belong to you, that there is an enduring moral order, that freedom and property rights are closely linked, that government exists to serve the people, and not vice-versa.

At the risk of insulting you, let's pretend for a minute that you are really what is called a liberal. You trust that government is generally better than free markets at solving problems for people and must be given the resources to do so. You believe that successful people in general are both fortunate and selfish and should share their wealth with unsuccessful people who you would rather refer to as less fortunate. You believe that there is no absolute right or wrong and you probably don't believe there is such a thing as evil. You believe that all cultures and life-styles are equally valid and you disapprove of anyone who would make value judgments between them.

The fact that you were motivated enough to call proves you are more politically aware than the average voter. We both know that America is in the midst of a culture war between the conservative and liberal world views. The Democrat Party is wedded to the liberal world view. The "grass-roots" of the Republican Party has been increasingly wedded to the conservative world view ever since Barry Goldwater ran for President. It will help to explain the mini-revolution if we start with just what a political party is and who is in charge of the party.

Our Founding Fathers gave us a representative democratic republic and a government "of the people, by the people and for the people". In the largest sense, a political party is a group of people with generally similar political values and goals. It is through the primary election process that a party selects from among its members people to run for political office who will protect and advance those values and goals. Anyone can run for political office but it is most often the case that candidates running for the first time emerge from among the party's activist "grass-roots".

The question of just who leads a political party is more interesting. Political parties elect people to government office to lead the community, the state or the country. The parties also elect their own party leadership. The party leadership has a choice. It can; 1. Represent the grass-roots philosophies and ideals and work with elected officials to strengthen them or it can; 2. Put the party's resources to work propagating the elected officials' policies and ideas down to the grass-roots.

Case two seems to be the norm. Top elected officials, Presidents, Senators, Congressmen often think they have also been elected to lead the party. Usually the party leadership agrees. It's less work, less stress and can often be a stepping stone into a lucrative position within government. Under those conditions an elected official can betray his party's principles quite flagrantly and for quite some time before encountering significant resistance from the grass-roots.

Case one, where party leadership is faithful and responsive to the grass-roots that elected it, is more rare. There is, or should be, a tension between the party leadership and the elected representatives in government particularly when an elected official campaigns on one philosophy and, once elected, switches to another.

The mini-revolution in the Arizona Republican Party culminated in January, 2007 when we changed state party leadership from operating under case two back to operating under case one. Until recently, the Republican Party structure in Arizona was a rubber stamp for our elected representatives. The Party served as a machine providing uncritical support of Republican incumbents and a vehicle for electing other candidates acceptable to, and often chosen by, those incumbents. The Party leadership did indeed feel it was responsible for propagating the ideas and policies of our elected officials down to the grass-roots and the voters.

John McCain was the catalyst that made that status quo unacceptable. Conservatives chafed under his attacks on the First and Second Amendments and his other anti-conservative positions and votes in the US Senate. They were further angered when he teamed up with democrats on "bi-partisan" objectives that resulted in outcomes that were far more liberal than conservative. In Arizona in 2002 a conservative grass-roots effort arose to recall John McCain. The effort was unsuccessful but, just as Barry Goldwater's conservative campaign made Ronald Reagan's conservative presidency possible, the Recall McCain effort sparked a revolution in the Party that may well make a John McCain presidency impossible.

The recall failed because McCain's power plus the party's resources were combined to discredit the recall campaign's message. In Phoenix one man, Rob Haney, set out to do something about that. He began at the grass-roots, walking door-to-door in central Phoenix in district 11 recruiting precinct committeemen who were conservative, politically aware, saw the problems and wanted to fix them. Within two years he had changed the District 11 organization to predominantly conservative and was elected Chairman in the November 2004 re-organizational election. Shortly after that he attracted John McCain's attention with something previously unseen in Arizona politics, a resolution of "Shame and Censure" to express conservatives' displeasure with the Senator's "maverick" activities.

Encouraged by Rob's success, conservatives in other districts began working on similar efforts. They banded together and soon the Maricopa County Republican Committee, the next higher party level was taken over by conservatives. In the January 2007 State Party organizational election the top level of the Republican Party in Arizona was taken over by conservatives in a near photo finish of 408 to 404 votes. The top-down, rubber-stamp era was over.

That sounded a lot easier than it was. Rob's temerity in censuring John McCain did not go unanswered. All during the summer of 2006 McCain's people were busy recruiting precinct committeemen in district 11. They were determined to clear Rob out of the way of John McCain's presidential run. They recruited a slate of candidates to replace Rob's team in district 11. To ensure a win, they recruited former Arizona Governor Fife Symington to run for Chairman against Rob.

Asking Fife, who formerly held the top job in state government, to run for the next-to-the-bottom job in the Party must have cost McCain every IOU he held on Fife. If it didn't, Fife's not half the man I think he is. We held that election with scrupulous attention to detail to ensure neither side had an opportunity to cheat. When the ballots were counted the results were a resounding 215 to 166 win for Rob and no doubt an embarrassment for Fife.

This is what has been going on, below the radar, in Arizona Republican Party politics over the last several years. Conservatives are making progress, amazing progress really, and it's in the direction you indicated during our conversation that we should be going.

Randy Pullen is our new State Party Chairman. His slogan was "Pullen for the Grass-Roots" and that is what he has been doing. Ending the rubber-stamp era in Arizona has made some of our elected representatives and even the Republican National Committee furious. They have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to undermine the functioning of the Arizona Republican Party. They have accused Randy of attacking Sen's Kyl and McCain over the immigration bill that the US Senate seemed determined to make law in spite of 80 percent or more of the public's disapproval. The allegation is patently false.

Randy has defended Jon Kyl and John McCain. The difference from the past is that he has been critical of the immigration bill itself and rightly so. In the past the bill would have received the Party's official rubber stamp of approval. If you called party headquarters then to express your anger you may as well have talked to the wall, or in this case, your Senator.

The battle is not over here in Arizona. The RINO's, (Republicans in Name Only), continue their efforts to restore their control of the Republican Party. It took a huge effort to gain a foothold and now that we have they try to demonize and discourage us. For attempting to keep the Reagan legacy alive, we are called "divisive" and "reactionary" and said to be destroying the Party.

Freedom is not free and the battle for it will never end because its enemy, what we presently call the Left here in America, will never go away. We need them anyway, to keep us sharp and alert to the precarious and fragile nature of our freedom. When we sleep for a second, they reach in to snatch some of it away and once gone it's nearly impossible to get back. Your right to self defense itself was taken away decades ago in the District of Columbia. Only recently is there a glimmer of hope that it might be restored. John McCain has said he wants to close the "gun-show loophole", the right of law-abiding citizens to freely buy and sell firearms among themselves. What's the logic? To stop criminals committing crimes with guns, take guns away from everybody. What's the result? Most mass-shootings occur in gun-free zones. John McCain's solution, when confronted with corruption of government officials evidenced by a quid-pro-quo for campaign contributions, was to infringe the speech rights of all the people rather than prosecute the corrupt officials. For the only-too-typical Senator or Congressman, this is the knee-jerk approach to a problem; to make the people safe and/or protect his position by chipping at the freedoms of the people. You don't have to think very hard to find a slew of examples.

All of this is why I urge you now, if you are a conservative, not to leave the Republican Party. Even if we are left with John McCain as our Presidential nominee, leaving the Party is not a way to punish your elected officials. What it really does is weaken the efforts that we at the grass-roots have made to begin holding those elected officials more accountable. It was support from conservatives within the Party that killed the Comprehensive Immigration bill and forced the change of Harriet Meiers' nomination to the Supreme Court to the more qualified Samuel Alito. We need your continued support to show them that the power in America still flows up from the bottom not down from the top and that conservatives cannot be led like sheep down a liberal road.

If you have some spare time, get involved. It's easy and there's lots of time to learn and lots of really interesting things to learn. Just call the party headquarters and get a conversation started. If you are more comfortable donating money rather than time, by all means do so, to your local district party, to the county party level or to the state party. The liberal Republican Party elites have convinced a few of the big contributors to withdraw their support until the rubber stamp comes out again. With your help that won't be any time soon and with just a few more small contributors we won't miss the "big" ones anyway.