Priebus plots RNC’s long climb out of financial hole

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Washington Times:

Reince Priebus, just over a month into his term as Republican National Committee chairman, is cutting costs and cultivating the party’s donor base in an aggressive bid to fix the national party’s tattered balance sheet.

The former Wisconsin Republican Party chairman has less than 20 months to whip the GOP’s most important money-raising instrument into shape to ensure his party’s candidates can compete with President Obama and congressional Democrats in the 2012 elections.

The troubled tenure of predecessor Michael S. Steele left the RNC deeply in debt and with what was once a battalion of big donors reduced to platoon strength. Mr. Priebus faces a challenge of the magnitude not encountered by an RNC chairman since George H.W. Bush took over the national party headquarters at the height of the Watergate crisis.

“I’m spending six hours a day on the phone to donors,” Mr. Priebus told The Washington Times.

Unlike Mr. Steele, who managed to pick public fights with top conservatives and took months to recruit a finance chairman, Mr. Priebus, 38, has avoided the spotlight and has recruited GOP fundraiser Ron Weiser of Michigan, a former ambassador to Slovakia, to be co-chairman of an internal financial oversight panel.

“We are back on track,” said Mel Sembler, RNC finance chairman when Mr. Bush was elected president in 1988.