RNC slashes staff

Fires 65 telephone solicitors, who blame a drop off in fundraising for the cut backs. But a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee says fundraising is going strong.

"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 The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain.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."

This sounds very, very bad.