Scott R. Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, won't get another term in office without a fight.
Longtime party activist Tim Whitacre has announced that he will challenge Baugh for the top slot at the county's most powerful political party.
The news came this morning in an e-mail Whitacre sent to GOP central committee members who are scheduled to vote on Jan. 17 for the party's executive committee candidates.
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Whitacre said in the announcement (obtained by OC Weekly from a high ranking party source) that it's time for “some necessary house cleaning” and that Baugh has led the party “long enough.”
influence since leaving the state assembly a decade ago–first grabbed the
chairmanship in 2004 after Tom Fuentes served in the role for 20 years. His admirers say he has done a decent job raising money and settling disputes between Republicans. He can certainly count on indefinite backing from establishment heavyweights like Michael J. Schroeder, Mark Bucher and Dana Rohrabacher.
But in
recent years, there's been mounting internal party dissatisfaction with what some
consider Baugh's cutthroat management style, his backing of disgraced
Sheriff Mike Carona long after it was clear he was a crook, his
refusal to obey party bylaws that call for regular audits of party
finances, his close association to a relentless pedophile who targeted 7th and 8th
grade boys and the local party's dwindling voter registration numbers.
Indeed, under Baugh's watch near Armagedon occurred in a place once proudly hailed as “Reagan Country”: Barack Obama, a liberal Chicago Democrat, did exceptionally well here in the 2008 elections.
Nevertheless,
Whitacre–a former U.S. Marine known as a stickler on ethics, a proponent of conservative grassroots activism and the man who led the 2003 recall of lefty Santa Ana school board member Nativo Lopez–has a
monumental task to make his case for new leadership at the OC GOP.
Baugh enjoys the knee-jerk support of two partisan online fish
wraps: Jon Fleischman's Flash Report and the Matt Cunningham-tied Red County. You can count on them to fillet Whitacre and champion Baugh in coming weeks.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
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