Elephants Haven’t Forgiven: GOP Snubbing Capizzi Again

State Republican officials are planning to snub Dist. Atty. Mike Capizzi for a second time as he attempts to promote his campaign for attorney general at the party’s biannual convention in Burlingame this weekend.

Capizzi said he has been denied the opportunity to set up a campaign table in the lobby of the Burlingame Hyatt hotel, where about 1,600 GOP leaders will gather beginning Friday. His Republican opponent in the race, former Chief Deputy Atty. Gen. David Stirling, will have a campaign table and preside over a Saturday general session on crime and justice.

The cold shoulder being given Capizzi is a repeat of the treatment he received at the party’s Anaheim convention in September, when he was barred from having a campaign table and excluded from official duties such as introducing speakers and other profile-raising perks. Stirling had a central table and was tapped to give an award to victim-rights advocate Mike Reynolds, the father of California’s three-strikes law.

State Republican Party Chairman Michael Schroeder said Capizzi doesn’t deserve “special treatment” at party functions because he was censured in a resolution passed by GOP delegates to a state party convention last year, and asked to resign.

“Nothing’s changed,” Schroeder said Tuesday. “We have a very limited number [of table spaces] to make available and we choose to make them available to those who have not been condemned by a unanimous vote of the party for misconduct.”

The slight is fine with Capizzi, who plans to be at the convention anyway.

“I have a lot of Republican friends and I’m looking forward to seeing them,” he said.

The resolution adopted last year blamed Capizzi for failing to prevent the Orange County bankruptcy and faulted him for what the resolution’s sponsors said were politically motivated prosecutions of Assemblyman Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach) and several GOP campaign aides involved in the special 1995 election to recall then-Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress). The aides pleaded guilty to misdemeanors; Baugh continues to fight felony charges in Orange County Superior Court.

Schroeder said Capizzi remains the object of “overwhelming antipathy” among party activists, heightened by “his failure to prosecute anyone in the massive voter-fraud scandal that erupted in Orange County.”

Schroeder was referring to an Orange County grand jury’s decision in December not to indict anyone affiliated with an immigrants’ rights group that registered voters for the 1996 election.

The U.S. House of Representatives last week rejected an election challenge filed by defeated Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), who claimed that noncitizen voters accounted for his 1996 loss to Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove). A House investigation found that immigrants were registered before becoming citizens, but the number wasn’t enough to overturn the election.

Capizzi’s campaign consultant, Ron Smith of Los Angeles, said continuing ire from GOP leaders only bolsters Capizzi’s campaign slogan that he’s “a prosecutor, not a politician.” Smith said the last time Capizzi was snubbed by the party his campaign benefited from increased campaign donations.

“We’ve gotten people on board because they feel a righteousness about it,” Smith said. “It’s helped fund-raising in Orange County and outside the county.”

Mike Mecey, a spokesman for Stirling’s campaign, said Capizzi’s contention that he is opposed only by a small cadre of GOP conservatives doesn’t square with the condemnation vote by hundreds of county chairs and grass-roots activists whose support is critical for statewide election success.

“Capizzi has been playing politics with prosecutions and that’s why the party has rejected him,” Mecey said.