Campaign ’12
Reince Priebus To the Rescue!
The GOP’s new chairman restores the party’s fi nances — and image — with a mix of hard work and straight talk.
By Ronald Kessler
January, Reince Priebus got grim news: The once-mighty RNC had no money to meet its payroll the follow- ing week.
T When Michael Steele had taken
over as chairman of the RNC in January 2009, it had $25 million cash on hand. Now it owed $25 mil- lion — $10 million to vendors and $15 million for a bank loan. To raise money, Priebus tells Newsmax, “We camped out for 10 hours a day and went through cold- calling as many of our old donors as I could fi nd in a three-ring binder.” Priebus had won election after fi ve
former RNC fi nance chairmen wrote letters to the 168 members of the RNC warning that re-electing Steele as chairman would be a disaster. Steele rarely got on the phone to raise money, according to RNC offi cials. Instead, he emphasized the small donor program, which nets
28 NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011
HE DAY AFTER BEING ELECTED chairman of the Republican National Committee in
only 40 cents for every dollar raised because of the cost of fundraising. He increased costs by putting aides on the payroll in Tampa long before the 2012 convention.
Steele was prone to mak- ing bizarre statements on TV, such as that the GOP could not win back a major- ity in the House in 2010. Small wonder that Brad Woodhouse, the Democratic National Committee’s communications director, sarcasti- cally called Steele “the gift that keeps on giving.”
Within a few months, Priebus turned that around. He fi red the workers in Tampa and cut other RNC employees.
“The major donors who had been in the thousands from the previ- ous cycles had pretty much disap- peared,” says former Ambassador Ron Weiser, the RNC fi nance chair- man Priebus recruited. “Priebus is bringing them back by re-establish- ing trust and credibility.”
Now the RNC has $7 million in trust to support the presidential
nominee. It has reduced its bank debt by $1 million and has pared debts to vendors to almost nothing. “In a matter of months, Reince Priebus has raised more major donor contributions than Michael Steele did in the two years that he was there,” says Mel Sembler, a promi- nent GOP fundraiser and former ambassador who is a co-chair of the RNC’s Finance Committee and has
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