Next week, California Republican Party Chairman Duf Sundheim will travel to Ramallah, Gaza, and the old city of Jerusalem, where he will declare the crisis in the Middle East to be over.
I like Duf, and I think he’s doing an excellent job as chairman of a party who’s natural instinct is to
form a circular firing squad at every convenient opportunity. But he’s been put in a lousy position here, because while he and most of his board members know that there’s no way in the world that the governor is going to fire Susan Kennedy, they needed to make it clear to Schwarzenegger how unhappy the party members they represent have become. Duf put the right face on the board meeting afterwards by emphasizing the policy ground on which Arnold stands, but it probably would have worked better if he’d been able to walk out with a fiscally responsible bond package in his hand.
So I don’t blame him for coming out of the meeting yesterday and pronouncing the controversy to be a thing of the past. I also still haven’t heard anyone who is angry with Arnold suggest a plausible alternative candidate for the GOP to run next year. But even if Schwarzenegger’s critics don’t yet have a back-up plan, it looks like these storm clouds are gong to be around for awhile.
This just in: on New Year’s Eve, Duf Sundheim will stand on the 50-yard line of the Rose Bowl and declare the USC-Texas game to be over.