CA Campaign 2010 Odds and Ends

Just because it's never too early to get a campaign fix, here are a few items that amused, exasperated and provoked me the past few days.

• Topline political commentators still have no idea what they're talking about concerning Barbara Boxer's race for Senate in 2010. Chris Cillizza seems to think that Boxer is vulnerable to a challenge by Arnold Schwarzenegger. First of all, her approval ratings are BETTER than Arnold's. Second, there's no way he can win a Republican primary after having advocated for tax increases. His positions on health care reform and global warming and Prop. 8 don't help either, but in particular the tax position is untenable in a closed Republican primary. Chuck DeVore would slaughter him in a straight-up one-on-one matchup. The Yacht Party isn't going to line up behind Schwarzenegger. It's just not going to happen. And Arnold knows it, which is why he won't run.

• As for Schwarzenegger's successor, the great hope of the Republican Party, former eBay executive Meg Whitman, has already lost top political operatives Steve Schmidt and Adam Mendelsohn before she's even announced for the position. FAIL. Although, given Schmidt's performance on John McCain's campaign, I'm not sure you want his help. I think it's important for Democrats to make Schmidt absolute poison for any California Republican seeking to hire him.

• Meanwhile, Jerry Brown, angling for the Governor's office for a third term, is getting fund-raising help from Gray Davis. See above re: poison.

• Glenn Greenwald has been tracking Dianne Feinstein's presumed backpedaling and vagueness regarding torture and forcing all branches of government to comply with the Army Field Manual on interrogations. This bears a lot of watching. Feinstein's equivocations and turnarounds against her constituents are so perfunctory now as to be banal, but if she thinks she can get away with wavering on torture and still try to win votes, she's just flat wrong.

• This article at Swing State Project posits that Obama won 4 Congressional districts in California currently held by Republicans - Gallegly (CA-24); Dreier (CA-26); Bono-Mack (CA-45); Bilbray (CA-50). He bases this on assumptions from the county-level data, assumptions which I'm not sure can be made. Anecdotally, I heard Obama carried CA-48, so if anything the diarist may be undercounting this. Once all the data is received, we'll have a full report, but I find this too speculative to be worthy of comment.