MUTH’S TRUTHS

Jeff Greenspan, Ron Paul’s out-of-state political operative who helped engineer last weekend’s fiasco at the Nevada Republican Party convention in Reno is tying himself in knots trying to spin his way out responsibility for the embarrassment he helped engineer.

The story line that the Ron Paul people desperately want to believe - as it fuels the already abundant level of paranoia which flows uncontrolled through their ranks - is that the state party had been conspiring behind closed doors to block any Ron Paul supporters from going to the GOP national convention in Minnesota later this summer. As you read much of their email traffic, you get a sense that they believe the Nevada GOP ranks right up there with the Council on Foreign Relations and the “empire” in the Star Wars movies.

What many of them have been crushed to discover since Saturday, however, is that Greenspan had been working hand-in-glove with the party all along. Contrary to the fashionable notion that the party was doing everything in its power to disenfranchise the Ron Paulites, the party had been actively and openly working with Greenspan. This is something Greenspan has reluctantly finally had to admit over the last couple of days. It seems he’s been a bit uncomfortable with the masses of paranoid Ron Paul supporters discovering he’s been sleeping with the enemy.

Another part of the problem which arose on Saturday was, frankly, the fact that so many of the Ron Paul delegates to the convention have never been involved in party activities like this before. They are “newbies.” And while the Nevada GOP in general, but Chairwoman Sue Lowden in particular, welcomed the passion and energy of these new grassroots activists, many simply didn’t know how the game was played. Many apparently and erroneously believed the party had established a Nominations Committee to screen prospective delegates to the national convention this year for the first time in history for the sole purpose of keeping out Ron Paul delegates.

For the record, a Nominations Committee is standard operating procedure for a lot of political organizations and conventions, as well as many non-political organizations. I can’t remember a time when the Nevada Republican Party convention didn’t have a Nominating Committee, whose job it is to screen potential national delegates and make recommendations to the full convention. The convention, however, has ALWAYS had the power to ignore the Nominations Committee’s recommendations. So none of this is anything new.

In any event, applications to convention attendees who wanted to be considered as possible delegates to the national convention were sent out in advance of the Nevada convention to help the Nominations Committee narrow down its list of recommendations. I’ve heard there are some questions about whether or not the delegates from Carson City received those applications, but my understanding is that everyone else got one. And it’s also my understanding that 25 Ron Paul supporters submitted applications.

Which brings us to how to divvy up the 31 national delegate slots among some 1,500 Nevada Republican convention attendees who supported a wide variety of presidential candidates at the presidential caucus last January 19th.

It appears the Nominations Committee, or maybe it was the party leadership, came to the conclusion that the fair thing to do would be to allot slots based on the percentage of the vote each presidential candidate received at the caucus. Mitt Romney received over 50 percent of the vote, so his supporters would be allotted about half of the delegates. Ron Paul came in second with less than 14 percent of the vote, so his supporters would get four slots. And so on.

Now this is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. I’ve been told that the party gave Jeff Greenspan the list of 25 names of Ron Paul supporters who sent in applications to be considered as delegates to the national convention. And I’m told that Greenspan’s the one who hand-picked the four Ron Paul supporters who would appear on the official slate card of delegates which would be presented to the convention by the Nominations Committee.

Are you following this so far, Paul People?

The Nominations Committee is a regular and normal function of the state convention. And contrary to the paranoid fear that the committee met in some secret cave out near Yucca Mountain to come up with a list of recommended national convention delegates which didn’t include anyone from the Ron Paul camp, your “leader” worked hand-in-glove with this committee and the party. He apparently agreed to the fair allotment of four delegates based on the caucus results and hand-picked the four individuals who would represent Ron Paul at the national convention in Minnesota. If there was any kind of “conspiracy” going on…your guy was part of it!

So if Greenspan was part of this entire process and agreed with it, where and how exactly did the wheels come off the apple cart?

According to Greenspan - and these are his actual, exact words, so I’m not making this up or surmising here - he somehow came to believe on Saturday morning “that the nominations committee, or certain parties on it, had no intention on holding up their end of the bargain.” Because of this, Greenspan claims, he unleashed what he describes as his “contingency plan” to scrap the deal he made with the party and instead back efforts to open the convention to nominations from the floor, thereby throwing the entire convention into chaos.

Let’s be clear here: Greenspan is accusing the nominations committee, or unnamed “certain parties” on the nominations committee, of conspiring at the last minute to strip the names of the four Ron Paul delegates that Greenspan hand-picked from the official slate of candidates the Nominations Committee was going to submit to the convention. That’s a pretty serious accusation.

Notice, however, that Greenspan offers no reason why the party, after negotiating with him (as well as the McCain folks) directly for months in a genuine effort to include the Ron Paul supporters in the process, would suddenly change its mind.

Notice also that Greenspan, who was welcomed into the state party process with open arms by State GOP Chairwoman Sue Lowden, never bothered to take his concerns on Saturday morning, if they were genuine, to Chairwoman Lowden. Instead he simply dropped the bomb and put his “contingency plan” into play.

Notice also that Greenspan gives no evidence to back up his claim that “certain parties” on the nominations committee had no intention of holding up their end of the bargain. In fact, the guy is actually now trying to get ME to obtain a copy of the Nominations Committee ballot which apparently he believes will “prove” that the committee was preparing to back out of the deal it had with him.

Um, question. If Greenspan is asking ME to produce a copy of that slate card, that means he doesn’t have it and never saw it himself. Well, um, if he doesn’t have a copy and never saw it, then what evidence does he have justifying his accusation that the Nominations Committee wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain? Hmmmm?

Notice also that Greenspan doesn’t name the “certain parties” on the Nominations Committee who he accuses of welching on the deal. So allow me.

From what I understand, the three top guys running the Nominations Committee were Doug Mathews, Howard Hirsch and Bruce Woodbury. And while the Ron Paul folks who are brand spanking new to Republican Party activities in this state might not know these gentlemen, those of us who have been around the track a few times sure do.

Mathews has been a rock-solid grassroots activist for as long as I can remember. His integrity has never been questioned by anyone I’ve ever talked to. Hirsch is a rock-solid limited government conservative who presently serves as Chairman of the Lyon County Republican Party. Again, of those who know Howard I don’t know of a soul who has ever questioned his integrity.

And Bruce Woodbury is and has been a Clark County commissioner since, I think, Nevada obtained statehood. While multiple other members of the Clark County commission have been marched off to jail for one criminal violation after another in recent years, Woodbury’s integrity has never been in doubt. And he’s one of the few elected Republicans you can ALWAYS count on to help the party and its candidates at crunch time.

If out-of-state political operative Jeff Greenspan is going to make a serious charge which brings into question the honesty and integrity of these three fine NEVADA Republicans, he better produce some proof. The burden is on Greenspan to tell everyone why he broke the deal since HE’S the one making the accusation that highly respected, longtime NEVADA Republican Party activists weren’t prepared to hold up their end of the bargain.

The bottom line is that it’s highly doubtful that Mathews, Hirsch and Woodbury conspired to strike all the Ron Paul names from the Nominations Committee slate. More likely Greenspan either got greedy once the convention started and thought he had the numbers to hijack it and get more than four slots in the national convention delegation after all. Or he was afraid of being discovered as a “Vichy” collaborator with the evil state party empire and decided to try to cover his posterior by leading the effort to throw the convention into chaos.

Truthfully, I don’t think anyone knows with absolute certainty what exactly went down on Saturday to cause Greenspan to go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Most of the information coming out of the Reno convention is of a he said/she said nature. All I know is that I’ll take the word of longtime NEVADA Republicans Sue Lowden, Bob Beers, Doug Mathews, Howard Hirsch and Bruce Woodbury - who have paid their dues and been in the Nevada GOP trenches for many, many years - over the forked-tongue word of out-of-stater Jeff Greenspan any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

One anonymous Ron Paul blog poster wrote yesterday asking why I seem so angry over all this. Well, I’ll tell you why. I know Sue Lowden. I know Bob Beers. I know Doug Mathews. I know Howard Hirsch. And I know Bruce Woodbury. They are friends of mine. I’ve worked with them for many years. They are good people. They are Republican “doers,” not “talkers.” And they don’t deserve the kind of scorn and hate that’s coming from the fringe elements of the Ron Paul campaign.

Yes, this character assassination and unsupported accusations against them makes me angry. Calling Sen. Beers a “thug” and Chairwoman Lowden a “criminal.” No, I’m not going to sit back and let these know-nothing, Johnny-come-lately’s drag these fine folks’ reputations through the mud unchallenged.

Greenspan, if you have proof that any of these people reneged on their deal with you, put up…or shut up.

Now, to end this edition of Nevada News & Views on a happy note, for those of you who may have never met Jeff Greenspan and don’t know what he looks like, this is NOT him (I think).

And no, this photo used by the Ron Paul folks in endorsing Heidi Smith for Republican National Committeewoman (hmmm, was there a quid pro quo there?) was not taken in this century.

Posted on April 30th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada