Is there a Scott Brown-like figure to surprise California Democrats this year? No. The politicians who are vying to replace Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as the ranking California Republican could scarcely be less like Scott Brown. Or, for that matter, Schwarzenegger.
The Republican who takes on wily Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown -- the former governor, presidential candidate, and Oakland mayor -- will be not a pickup truck-driving pseudo-independent but a plutocrat hugging the far right rail of the current Republican primary.
The Republican who takes on feisty Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer will be not a populist-sounding moderate inveighing against the manipulations of entrenched wealth and power but a golden parachute corporate CEO, a fringe right state legislator, or an intellectual ex-congressman whose faculty advisor was Milton Friedman.
And none of them will be a global icon with a common touch.
New Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown shows off his pickup truck and his populist independent positioning.
Where Scott Brown (who is no relation to Jerry Brown, though their signs look a lot alike) and his consultants defined his political positioning in the absence of any contested Republican primary, enabling him to go right after the independents who decided the Massachusetts special election, the California Republicans running for governor and U.S. senator are engaged in nasty primary fights. Four of the five, including the two gubernatorial candidates, are hewing as much as possible to the far right ideology that animates the California Republican Party.
The principal fight in the California Republican primaries for governor and U.S. senator will be over who is more conservative than the next candidate.
Which has been obvious for over two years now.
In September 2007, Schwarzenegger, alarmed by the ever rightward drift of his party since his two landslide elections as governor in 2003 and 2006, went to the California Republican Party convention on a Friday night at a luxury resort hotel in Indian Wells near Palm Springs. There, in a speech which I'd previewed on my New West Notes blog, he challenged the growing far right orthodoxy and warned the leading activists in his party that they risked making the Republican Party irrelevant in California statewide elections unless they recognized that the center of gravity was more towards the center than the far right.
I was on hand for Schwarzenegger's speech to the party. The reaction of most delegates can best be described as tepid. At best.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed California's landmark climate change program into law in this 2006 ceremony on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair participating via satellite.
Schwarzenegger's speech was followed immediately by an appearance by Texas Governor Rick Perry, who lately has become notorious for urging that Texas secede from the Union. I stuck around for Perry's talk, curious to compare and contrast the response he received to that accorded to Schwarzenegger.
The difference was like night and day. The Republican delegates loved Perry's routine, which was all the familiar right-wing red meat.
They were totally unfazed by the fact that Schwarzenegger had just won a 17-point landslide re-election victory over Democrat Phil Angelides, matching his 17-point landslide victory in the 2003 California recall election as the biggest California Republican victory since then Governor George Deukmejian beat then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in his 1986 re-election campaign.
I talked with some of the delegates, and most simply didn't care. Perry was telling them what they wanted to hear, which was in line with the rhetoric spewed forth from right-wing radio shows, blogs, and the Young Americans for Freedom alums elected in gerrymandered state legislative districts.
Billionaire Meg Whitman, a Republican candidate for governor of California, says she hasn't voted very often. She's already matched the personal spending record for a California primary race and the primary election isn't until June.
The next day, after watching John McCain give a luncheon speech as he worked to reboot the presidential campaign that had imploded earlier in 2007, I drove off from Palm Springs and ended up talking on the phone to Jerry Brown. He made it clear that he was thinking of running for governor -- still "thinking," incidentally, though he cleared the Democratic field last year, as I explained here on the Huffington Post -- and wondered about the bottom line on the Republican convention and Schwarzenegger's attempt to move the party toward the center.
The bottom line, of course, was clear. Schwarzenegger's attempt to move his party away from the far right was already failing. Future Republican candidates would have to kow-tow to a militant ideological hardcore.
And this is exactly what is happening.
In the California Republican primary for the Senate, only former Silicon Valley Congressman Tom Campbell has a modicum of moderation. And he's a former disciple of Milton Friedman, who when he ran for the Senate in the 1990s wanted to include China in NAFTA. Ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is a staunch conservative, a former spokesperson for the last Republican presidential campaign. (Who got in trouble when she said that Sarah Palin couldn't run Hewlett Packard.) And state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore is a Tea Party guy.
Ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a Republican candidate for the Senate, discusses her lucrative severance package.
In the governor's race, billionaire ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and super-rich state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner are both hugging the right-hand rail of the race course. With the exception of abortion, it's all right-wing all the time for these two. Neither is going to be driving around California in a pickup truck or showing up on factory floors.
Scott Brown, who avoided having any primary in Massachusetts, was free to run as a de facto independent. (And fortunate to run against, in Martha Coakley, a candidate with less experience in electoral politics than he had.)
The irony is that neither Whitman, whose only previous involvement in public affairs was her service as national co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign and national financ co-chair of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, nor Poizner, who made a fortune devising mobile phone tracking technology, has as conservative a background as the positions they espouse in their campaigns for governor.
Whitman, well, we don't really know what she thought about politics before the last few years. She seldom bothered to even vote. And, like Democrat Al Checchi, whose primary personal spending record of $40 million she's already matched (the primary this year isn't until June), never so much as wrote an op-ed piece to express her concerns about California.
Former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Poizner, a Republican candidate for governor, talks up his tax cuts-heavy economic program on Larry Kudlow's CNBC show.
Ad for Poizner, he has a much longer standing record of public involvement not necessarily related to his own advancement, including service as a White House fellow and as a school teacher. And of course, he's actually bothered to service in public office before pretending he ready to be governor of America's largest and most complex state.
But the irony is that he had seemed to be one of the few Arnold Republicans. Schwarzenegger discovered Poizner during his ill-fated 2004 attempt to defeat Democrats in a dozen state Assembly districts he had carried during his landslide victory in the 2003 California recall campaign.
Poizner ran as a very moderate Republican in a San Francisco Bay Area district, losing despite spending $6 million from his personal fortune. But he was the only good thing to come out of the disastrous effort, which had been masterminded for Schwarzenegger by his then chief political strategist Mike Murphy, who is now a Meg Whitman strategist.
Schwarzenegger raved about what a great guy Poizner was and vowed to keep him involved, appointing him to the state Public Utilities Commission. However, Poizner's personal finances were so tangled in potential conflicts of interest that he could not be confirmed, which Schwarzenegger finally, regretfully, acknowledged in pulling the appointment. Schwarzenegger then involved him in his redistricting reform efforts before Poizner joined Schwarzenegger in 2006 as the only Republicans to win statewide office. But by the time of that fateful state Republican convention in September 2007, it was clear that the far right was the dominant tendency in party politics, and Poizner was running for governor.
To the great amusement of the crowd, Jerry Brown discusses the governance of California in this 2005 conference at UCLA with former Governors George Deukmejian and Gray Davis.
Perhaps this is one reason why the usually ebullient Schwarzenegger appeared unusually subdued yesterday in his final annual luncheon address to the state capital's press club. Undoubtedly another is that the chronic state budget deficit was driven skyward by the near meltdown of the global financial system, with his combination of spending limits and tax hikes shot down at the polls last spring.
Still, the lack of a moderate Republican successor -- much less any figure even approximating a Scott Brown -- is clear.
Which may account for his comments in Sunday's Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times. Schwarzenegger discusses the difficulty of enacting sweeping change in government -- think back to the entire year he spent on trying to pass a Hillary Clinton-esque universal health care program after winning a landslide re-election victory in November 2006 -- and has some interesting things to say about his successor as governor.
Arnold freely talks about his admiration for Jerry Brown. Would he be upset if the Republicans lost and Brown succeeded him?
"No," he said, taking a final puff. "I think the best person should win, whatever party that is."
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.
Now seriously. What clear minded, non-ideological Californian would pick a candidate with no clear game plan over the one who does?
Whitman is looking for solutions. Brown is looking for villains. Which is the better path?
I suspect that when he does announce for governor, his web site will change to reflect the office ...
If she had a plan, she could answers questions from reporters who know California. She doesn't so she can't, and she won't.
Or look at the video where he enacts the climate change program.
Now, in the case of the GOP, it's comforting that they believe Brown's victory & general dissatisfaction means GOP & ind. voters are hungry for hardcore, tea-partying fundies... this means they'll slate these kinda bozos & the likelihood of a big GOP rebound will diminish. If this happens in CA...it'll ensure a Dem victory (unless he/she is too far left).
Brown was an aberration because people in MA are much happier w/there healthcareprogram than the rest of the nation...they didn't want any tinkering. His victory is/was NOT a bellwether that the center is swinging right...but the GOP believes it is. GREAT!
But at the same time, 'progressives' keep trying to spin every omen into a call for Obama & the party to veer hard left. Liberals make up a TINY fraction of voters...MUCH tinier then the hardcore wing of the GOP, yet they refuse to compromise & berate moderation & centrism as worse than conservatism.
See, to your chagrin, it is we moderates/independents who hold all the cards in recent years. WE are the majority...WE can sway state & national elections. We want/wanted change as much as you...which is why so many of us voted for Obama. But you've made the grave mistake of twisting that into some deluded mandate that we want a 'progressive agenda'.
Luckily, the GOP's false belief that moving to the extreme seems to be much stronger than that of the Dems...they actually MIGHT slate Palin/Huckabee-types in upcoming elections, thinking that that's what America wants. And of course, that'll bode well for the Dems...UNLESS they go too-hard the other way.
I wonder though, if even a scaled-back culture-issues race with targeted attacks on NON-cultural issues could be a winner for Republicans. The Demographics seem tough to beat. So too, the incumbency advantages for an entrenched Sen. Boxer.
Still I would like to see whomever emerges from right-field, attack the economic disconnect between CA's go-it-alone environmentalism with the reality of 12% unemployment, a shrinking manufacturing base, and an ongoing water-crisis that threatens Valley Ag and So. Cal industry.
Any hope?
Which isn't really the point. Coakley could and should have won that race. The Democratic Party failed at every level in monitoring the situation and acting to correct it.
I do not recall ANY media outlets portraying Coakley as the "Best" Candidate for Mass.
Typical propaganda ploy:Make stuff up exaggerating reality to create a straw man.
Yet the Repubs also think their party going way to the right, way way to the right, is okay. The Dems should be more centrist, and Repubs can govern as whacked out to the right as they can get. The further and farther, the better.
Idea: Repubs, why not make even a fake, veiled attempt to be more centrist/moderate party?
Clue: Regardless of the Repub talking points, this is not a right of center country. It surely is not a waaaaay right of center country.
This idea of Arnold as moderate trying to pull CA GOP from brink, while maybe true today, was a tactic he turned to after his own attempt at hard right politics failed when he went after the teachers and nurses, calling them "special interests." The initiatives he supported all went down to defeat and, just as we are seeing with BO now, Arnold recalibrated himself as the equivalent of a blue dog Democrat.
1. Fiorina was fired for incompetence.
2. Whitman is a bad arrogant candidate, can't answer questions to save her life.
3. Neither one is anything like Scott Brown.
4. Schwarzenegger ran as a moderate both times he won in 2003 and 2006.
Thanks for playing...
The rest is opinion, as is your reply.
You present another theory. Which is an old theory, incidentally, which has never worked in California.
It has never happened.
Even Schwarzenegger raises most of his campaign money from other people.
He will be the smartest person on any stage this year.
>>>> To the great amusement of the crowd, Jerry Brown discusses the governance of California in this 2005 conference at UCLA with former Governors George Deukmejian and Gray Davis.
"Just cut taxes! Everything works like magic after that!"
What a laugh.
>>>> Former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Poizner, a Republican candidate for governor, talks up his tax cuts-heavy economic program on Larry Kudlow's CNBC show.
>>>> Ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a Republican candidate for the Senate, discusses her lucrative severance package.
I don't think she's a regular guy or gal, just very obnoxious.
>>>> Billionaire Meg Whitman, a Republican candidate for governor of California, says she hasn't voted very often. She's already matched the personal spending record for a California primary race and the primary election isn't until June.
>>>> Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed California's landmark climate change program into law in this 2006 ceremony on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair participating via satellite.
>>>> New Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown shows off his pickup truck and his populist independent positioning.