Blaming the messenger at RNC

Washington Times:

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned.
Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.
Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.
"Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said a fired phone bank employee who said the severance pay the RNC agreed to pay him was contingent on his not criticizing the national committee.
A spokeswoman for the committee denied any drop-off in fundraising.
"Any assertion that overall donations have gone down is patently false," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail yesterday in response to questions sent by The Times. "We continue to out-raise our Democrat counterpart by a substantive amount (nearly double)."
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Previous Republican donors have given RNC solicitors an earful about the proposed immigration measure.
"We have not heard anyone in our donor calls who supported the president on immigration," said a fired phone solicitor, who described himself as a Republican activist.
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"We write these comments up from each call, and give them to a supervisor who passes them on to the finance director or the national chairman," he said. "But when I talked with the White House, the people there told me they got nothing but positive comments on the president's immigration stand."
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) both report having trouble raising money from the small donors who are the backbone of all the fundraising committees for both major parties.
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It is ridiculous for some one at the White House to claim they get nothing but positive comments on the immigration proposal when the President is clearly angry about the negative reaction from many conservatives over that proposal. His accusations earlier this week about critics of the proposal speak for themselves.

I think the fund raising for the Republicans has been going down since the Gang of 14 shafted us on the fight over judges. I know that is when I quit making my small donations. That was a betrayal that still reverberates and was a major cause of declining support in the 2006 race.

The immigration fight is another emotional issue with many. Much of it is because there is a lack of trust of any real enforcement in the long term. The other is the mass legalization of the illegal regardless of whether they choose to pay the "fine" to become citizens. With the mass legalization, and the so called Z visas they do not need to become citizens and thus they get a much better deal than those who play by the rules.