From: "Rich Gauszka" 

Looks like Gary did withhold his donations ;-)

"We have not heard anyone in our donor calls who supported the
president on immigration," said a fired phone solicitor

 http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20070601-122909-8977r.htm

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)."

    Miss Schmitt said terminating the phone solicitation staff "was not an
easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the
phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The
RNC was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain
viable."
    She also said that "the changing ways in which people choose to
contribute" meant that the RNC's in-house phone bank "was simply
no longer cost effective, although unfortunate."

    The fired staffers said the equipment was aging and it was probably more
cost effective to farm out the phone-bank operations to the eight or more
private firms also handling similar solicitations for donations to the RNC.
But the ex-employees said the sharp drop-off in donations
"probably" hastened the end of the in-house operation.

    "Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way
they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by
the end of 2007," said another fired phone-bank employee who asked not
to be identified.

    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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