CA Campaign Update: CA-03, CA-04, CA-46, Assembly & Senate

Here's some tidbits from the campaign trail with 12 days out:

• CA-03: Bill Durston and Dan Lungren debated last night, and it was a predictable affair, says Randy Bayne:

Nothing new, no fireworks, no knockout punch, no excitement of any kind was reported by either MyMotherLode.com or the Stockton Record. Just what we already know — Durston wants us out of Iraq, doesn’t like No Child Left Behind, and thinks the bailout is the wrong solution. Lungren supports the occupation, favors No Child Left Behind, and voted for the bailout.

If you’re looking for change from eight years of down the toilet policy, and you don’t want to continue flushing our future down the crapper – vote for Bill Durston.

If the registration stats cited by anecdotal reports are at all accurate, we're going to be very close to registration parity in this seat by Election Day. Lungren may be acting positive in public, but inside the campaign they must be terrified. They probably didn't expect Durston to run a credible campaign.

• CA-04: Tom McClintock has caught a bit of trouble for relating gay people to dogs in a roundabout way.

"Lincoln asked, 'If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? The answer is four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one,'" McClintock said in a statement. "And calling a homosexual partnership a marriage doesn’t make it one."

I'm pretty sure that means nothing at all, but California's Alan Keyes has had to distance himself from the comment. Meanwhile his much bigger problem is lacking the funds to run a proper campaign. He's now taken to relying on cheap robocalls, and Charlie Brown has immediately called on him to stop. Dirty trick robocalls that appeared to be coming from the Brown campaign were a major factor in John Doolittle's narrow re-election in 2006.

• CA-46: I didn't get a chance to post Debbie Cook's amazing closing statement at Tuesday's debate. Here it is.



The OC Register has a story on this race today. These "Challenger hopes to upset incumbent" stories have a familiar feel to them - the pose of surprise that the race is competitive, the quote from the shallow CW fountain like Allen Hoffenblum explaining why the incumbent is probably still safe, and the overall sense of shock, which would be natural if you weren't paying attention for the last 18 months, like, um, us.

• Assembly & Senate: Art Torres and Ron Nehring had a debate yesterday, and I think Torres needed to be prepped a little better. He claimed that Democrats could grab a 2/3 majority in the legislature but then couldn't come up with a simple list of what seats are in play. He should be reading more Calitics. Nehring replied with a lot of bunk and a little truth.

None of that adds up to 54 and 27, of course, and Nehring said Torres' boast "just doesn't pencil out."

He noted that Democratic efforts to oust Sen. Jeff Denham via recall failed miserably this year and the party ended up with no opponent to challenge Sen. Abel Maldonado in Santa Maria, a district believed to be winnable by a Democrat.

On the Assembly side, Nehring said, Republicans "have a great shot at holding on to" the 15th and "have a number of strategic advantages in the 78th (because) the Democrats have nominated the most liberal candidate (Marty Block) they possibly could."

In the 80th, the Democratic candidate (Manuel Perez) "is getting hammered on ... social issues which are important to many people in the Latino community," Nehring said.

"I don't know how can you be serious about trying to have a two-thirds vote in the Legislature," Nehring told Torres, "when you blow so many of these opportunities."

I'll go bottom to top on this. Manuel Perez is going to CRUSH Gary Jeandron, and if anyone's being hammered, it's the Republicans. The IE money is pretty one-sided in the state. Between that and the registration gains, it'll take more than just spin to dig your party out of its self-created hole, Mr. Nehring.

However, on one point I will agree with you. The Denham recall and Maldonado disaster have indeed stopped the potential forward momentum in the Senate. Of course, Torres couldn't say the plain truth - that Don Perata is among the worst leaders in recent Democratic Party history, and has completely set back the state in major ways by his blunders. He is an embarrassment.

Torres: "This is about voter suppression."

I just jumped off a conference call with some members of the Democratic National Committee and CDP Chair Art Torres about the arrest of YPM founder Marc Jacoby on suspicion of voter registration fraud. As you may know, Jacoby's firm has been "slamming" voters in the Riverside County area, telling them that they were signing ballot initiatives but actually flipping their party affiliation to the Republican Party from the Democratic Party. While the substance of the call was to talk about hypocrisy in the GOP, raising the issue of ACORN in recent weeks while blinded to the fraud their own vendors participate in, Torres was pretty unsparing in his description of YPM. "The California GOP and the RNC need to terminate their relationship with YPM immediately," said Torres. "They shouldn't wait for a conviction to distance themselves from these shady practices." It was revealed yesterday that a joint finance committee of the RNC, McCain-Palin and the Yacht Party has been paying Nathan Sproul, who owns a separate voter registration group that has been accused of rampant fraud. Said Torres, "This is a consistent pattern of bad behavior."

Curiously, nobody seems to be talking about the bigger issue here, which is the fact that YPM was not only slamming voters, but changing their ballot status to absentee, so that when a voter goes to the polling place on Election Day, they are told that they signed up to vote by mail and cannot vote in the election without their absentee ballot. There are issues with slamming, related mainly to GOTV efforts (Democrats don't try to turn out Republicans), but the absentee situation is a pretext for real disenfranchisement. So I asked Chairman Torres about this, and he agreed. "This is designed to create confusion at the polls and force people into filling out provisional ballots. There are still hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots that haven't been counted from Ohio in 2004. This is about voter suppression, and we've seen it over and over again in California." He related it to the Dirty Tricks Initiative and the signature gathering fraud used to try and get that on the ballot.

The question, of course, is what we can do about the particular voters affected. YPM is out of business and hopefully their founder will be in jail. But there is no telling how many voters had their party ID switched or their ballot status switched. Hopefully the Secretary of State can come up with some way to verify anyone who passed through YPM's hands.

Can Arnold Pass The High School Exit Exam?

The fallout from Gov. Schwarzenegger's demeaning comments about small-town Californians continue to reverberate. Chairman Torres weighed in, and noted that rural Californians don't exactly use a horse and buggy to get around, and some of them even have the teevee and the Internets!

“The Governor’s comments are insulting,” Torres told PolitickerCA.com today. “California does not have villages. This is not Austria, this is California. Voters in Central California and others from small towns have more on the ball than Arnie!”

State Senator Dean Florez, from the small Central Valley town of Shaffer, went a step further, introducing a resolution to have the Governor take the high school exit exam.

Like every other kid around the state, small town students take the same graduation tests as big city kids to show competency. Rural kids can make the grade. Given the Governor’s distasteful comments, what’s unanswered is whether he can make the grade.

That’s why, today, I’m introducing a senate resolution asking the Governor to take the high school exit exam. If the Governor fails the test, then we certainly have a capable Lt. Governor who can assume his duties until the Governor successfully passes the exam.

I hope that he accepts this challenge and that he doesn’t cower behind some excuse. This is a serious effort to bring attention to the divisiveness of placing labels on people based on who they are, how they live or where they come from -- or even how well they do on a test.

If it is a good enough test for our twelfth graders, then certainly it is a good enough test for the Governor to demonstrate his competency.

And after he takes the exam, maybe he’ll think twice about the massive cuts to education funding he's proposing -- he just may have to return to school to brush up for the test.”

I would pay money to sit in while Arnold fills in the bubbles on the Scan-Tron sheet. Can we get this on television? It'd be the first time local news covered state politics all year!

Art Torres Lied To Us

Several months ago, at a time where Dianne Feinstein was facing censure for a series of votes siding with the Bush Administration over Democratic values or the Constitution, Art Torres assured us all, in a highly emotional speech, that he discussed telecom immunity, a forthcoming issue, with her, and that "thanks to her" immunity was stripped from the bill.

"Don't believe me, ask my friend Senator Dodd, who will tell you that she led the effort along with him to make sure that [immunity] wasn't in the official bill that emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee."

That wasn't true then, of course; Patrick Leahy's ju-jitsu by putting immunity in Title II of the bill and then dropping it was what did the trick. But of course, that wasn't enough. The Intelligence Committee bill, the one with amnesty for the phone companies, was what made it to the floor. Feinstein offered some amendments. Her "exclusivity" amendment to make FISA the exclusive means under which government spying takes place "failed" because only 57 Senators voted for it; under the unanimous consent agreement, that particular amendment needed 60 votes to pass because it had too much support. This essentially invalidates all laws passed by the Congress, since in the absence of exclusivity, what is implied is that the President has the ability to go outside whatever law is passed.

So in that environment, there was a vote to strip telecom immunity from the bill. This is something the President alone can't dictate to the courts. This is the only opportunity to find the truth about how our government spied on us. And Dianne Feinstein, hoping that we weren't paying attention, voted against stripping it out.

It was a few months away from any pressure on her, so she felt OK with allowing the President to break American laws. Here's what's happening today:

The Senate today -- led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus -- will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration's years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans. The long, hard efforts by AT&T, Verizon and their all-star, bipartisan cast of lobbyists to grease the wheels of the Senate -- led by former Bush 41 Attorney General William Barr and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick -- are about to pay huge dividends, as such noble efforts invariably do with our political establishment.

Every single Senator, all of whom committed to a unanimous consent agreement that precluded any possibility to amend the bill, is responsible. But everyone in the world knew Dianne Feinstein would sell us out and give the phone companies what they wanted for violating civil liberties. Everyone, that is, except for Art Torres.

I'd like a personal apology, thanks. So should everyone who was in that room in Anaheim.

A Turning Point For The Progressive Movement in California

Here we see California Democratic Party strategist Bob Mulholland acting like a four year-old because he feels the grip of power slipping away.



Julia Rosen has the full story on this at Crooks and Liars. Much ink has been spilled from the results of the executive board meeting and the squashing of the censure resolution of Dianne Feinstein, but the bottom line is this. That meeting will be remembered as the moment when the grassroots rose to prominence in California. It will be remembered as the moment that Courage Campaign became the MoveOn.org of California. And it will be remembered as a turning point, the moment when the establishment that has been running the Party their way for decades finally got nervous.

Art Torres' message to the party was cleverly edited to make it look like he just spent a few minutes on the Feinstein situation. Actually, he spent about a half-hour on it, extolling the virtues of the senior Senator and pleading with the members not to go forward with condemning her. The scene in the Resolutions Committee resulted in the chairman phsyically shoving an activist for putting up a sign. That's a defensive posture, and it springs from the mentality of a leadership which chooses not to work in concert with, or even listen to, its base.

Bob Mulholland is nothing but a firewall. He was sent in to hold back the rabble, and this past weekend he did his job. That he's paid by the rank and file of the party to ensure that their voices aren't heard is certainly perverse, but the bigger problem is who's paying him. Last weekend's events did change the conversation. The Party leadership has two options. They can listen to the concerns of the rank and file, and build lines of communication to facilitate that, or they can continue this practice of stonewalling and plowing forward with their own agenda. The former could succeed; the latter is destined to fail.

Wake Up: Sen. Feinstein Did Not Kill Telecom Immunity

You can draw your own conclusions from what went down this weekend in Anaheim, where a physical altercation and an eventual squashing of the censure resolution to Dianne Feinstein made for an unusually interesting executive board meeting. But I have to call attention to what is being put out there as a growing meme, that DiFi somehow worked with Chris Dodd to "kill" telecom immunity in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Art Torres in his speech to the party reiterated this point. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth, and anyone pushing this line is delivering blatant misinformation.

Sen. Feinstein voted AGAINST stripping immunity out of the Title II provisions of the bill. The eventual vote to report out a bill without immunity was simply a chance to buy time. As I noted the other day, James Risen's article in the New York Times nailed this:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who also opposed Mr. Feingold's measure, pleaded with Mr. Leahy to defer the immunity issue because she wants more time to consider several compromise proposals.

What happened in the Judiciary Committee was a punt. There's going to be a floor fight, and NOTHING is resolved. DiFi wants to sign on to a bipartisan centrist compromise that probably won't be a compromise at all. If and when she does so, we can assess her position on the merits; for now, we can continue to tell her how we feel on the issue (And I hope Chairman Torres along with anyone else concerned about granting legal amnesty to companies who break the law and violate our privacy will continue to do so). But suggesting that she "led the fight" to kill telecom immunity is an insult to my intelligence. How can you kill something that's not dead, and where the so-called leader is actually looking for ways to return it to the bill on the floor? Try that logic on somebody else.

(Incidentally, the way certain progressive organizations whooped and hollered and jumped in to take credit for DiFi's vote, which was nothing more than a vote to take pressure off of her, didn't help matters.)

The Bermuda Triangle

It's nice that the California Democratic Party is targeting three members of the Southern California "Culture of Corruption" caucus (Gary Miller, Jerry Lewis, Ken Calvert) with a website. It'd be nicer if they supported the grassroots candidates that are running in those respective districts (Ron Shepston, Tim Prince, Bill Hedrick). After all, THEY'RE the ones who need name ID and recognition, not the Republicans.

I'm not sure what the CDP is after here. They've got just a few seats to go to grab 2/3 support in the state legislature, yet perusing through their site you see almost no mention of that. When you hear Art Torres speak, he never really talks about State Assembly or State Senate seats, only the Congress. Why does our state party see its role as solely to support federal or statewide candidates? One would think that party building would start locally. Building the Democratic bench in the state legislature would bubble up to the Congressional seats, too, yet the CDP seems determined to go the other way around.

I'm not totally criticizing it, I just wonder why this party has a different way of looking at its role than, say, New Hampshire or North Carolina does.

CDP Convention: The Sour Taste

I thought I'd give a little bit more detail about what happened at the end of the convention, which ended with a quorum call and an abrupt close to business.

Let me first say that I do not have this inflated sense about the importance of CDP resolutions. They reflect the spirit and the passion of the activist community of delegates, but they are not pieces of legislation that can be enforced. They are a nice endorsement for certain issues, and the delegates can feel like they have done something. But they are not binding. It has to amuse me, in a cynical way, that this entire brouhaha is over a nonbinding resolution on Iraq, brought to you by many of the same people who decried the Congress' nonbinding resolution on Iraq.

That said, I do think it's a serious issue from the standpoint of small-d democracy and the ability for the will of the delegation to be expressed, as well as what it bodes for the real structural reforms that are needed in the party.

The facts of the situation are this. There were 13 resolutions voted on at the convention on the final day. This was the very last business done on the floor, and this is fairly typical in an off-year (endorsements, I believe, sometimes come after the resolutions). We've gone over how the resolutions committee did a lot of the work on resolutions before anyone ever got to the convention, making rulings on the 104 resolutions submitted, and in some cases tabling, referring, or directing resolutions as out of order. Eventually the 104 were whittled down to the 13 that went to the floor, the result of many meetings and compromises.

Now, the progressive grassroots, led by PDA (Progressive Democrats of America), really focused their attention on an impeachment resolution. They would maybe say otherwise, but it is undeniable. They worked their tails off and mobilized dozens of supporters to carry banners, flyers, signs, to sit in every committee meeting. They whipped their people up into a frenzy over it. Added to this outside strategy was an inside strategy, using former members of the Resolutions Committee as a liaison to hammer out compromise language that could get the resolution to the floor. They succeeded on their main goal; an "investigations toward impeachment" resolution passed. This was really something of a small miracle, and the result of hard work and serious grassroots action.

But there was a price. All of the energy put into the impeachment resolution took away from many of the other priorities of the Progressive Slate, priorities on which I ran - single-payer health care, clean money, election protection, net neutrality. None of these made it out of committee. Privately, some high-profile PDA members were very angry about this series of events. They considered it wrong to ditch these other important proposals to put all the eggs in the impeachment basket. I would add the 58-county strategy and the Audit Committee proposals to that, which were remanded to a task force for study, despite the fact that a significant number of signatures were collected to bring it to the floor (it couldn't because of that new rule about resolutions which are referred or tabled not allowed to go through that process). Chairman Torres appointed some of the main leaders in creating the Audit Committee proposal to the task force, and seemed sincere in his vow to abide by the wish to look at how the CDP funds races. Stay tuned on that.

Resolutions on Iraq fell somewhere in the middle. The Chairman of the Party and Senate leader Perata had a vested interest in getting the delegates to endorse their language on the Out of Iraq initiative, scheduled to move through the legislative process and onto the February ballot. Here's the key text:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the California Democratic Party wholeheartedly supports the following statement: "The people of California, in support of the men and women serving in the Armed Forces of the United States, urge President Bush to end the US occupation of Iraq and immediately begin the safe and orderly withdrawal of all United States combat forces; and further urge President Bush and the United States Congress to provide the necessary diplomatic and non-military assistance to promote peace and stability in Iraq and the Middle East; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the California Democratic Party urges other states to follow suit unifying our country in its absolute desire to see an immediate end to the Iraq War and sending the strongest possible message to President Bush and the Republican presidential candidates.

Perata wants to take the resolution to other states as well. And certainly there's a benefit in forcing state Republicans and the Governor to have to take a position on Iraq before 2008 (if the state party uses those votes). But the point is that the party leaders had a vested interest in keeping the Perata resolution clean, without amendments.

But four amendments were offered on the floor. Any delegate can pull the resolution and move to amend, and those amendments are then voted on in turn. It happened with a few of the other resolutions (all the amendments failed, I believe). On this one, two amendments added more specific language; one to cut off funding totally for the occupation of Iraq, and another to de-authorize the legislation that took the country to war. A third amendment changed "Republican presidential candidates" to "all Presidential candidates," and a fourth tried to insert language abut Iran. The fourth one was immediately ruled out of order and not germane.

On the others, the progressive grassroots and the Party leaders forged a compromise that, if it had succeeded, would have had everyone going home with a smile on their face. The Perata bill would go forward without amendment; but then the two substantive amendments, on cutting funding and de-authorization, would become separate resolutions that could be debated and voted on immediately thereafter. Chairman Torres had to suspend the normal rules regarding resolutions to make this happen, and it showed an effort to offer the best of both worlds. Sen. Perata gets his bill endorsed by the Party, and the progressives get their resolutions the full force of passage. A cheer went up in the crowd when this happened. A lot of goodwill was gained in that moment. PDA and their allies would have gone home meeting their goals on Iraq and impeachment, which would not have been expected.

And then, in a moment, it was gone.

Karen Wingard, a regional director from Southern California, in association with Ted Smith, a member of the Resolutions Committee, called for quorum. The rest here:

Someone called for a quorum on the presumption that there wouldn't be a quorum, so no more debate could be conducted and business would be over. When the quorum call was made, they immediately started counting--I barely had time to run from the blogger table back to my region--much less anyone from the hallway.

A lot of people are upset about this--there are people who are saying they expect parliamentary crap like this to be pulled by the Republican party, not by Democrats.

A quorum is 1155, and there are only 623 delegates. No more business can be conducted. The convention is over and we can only hear reports.

All of the goodwill of the previous several minutes was lost. People predisposed to believe the worst about the Party leadership was given the excuse they needed to believe it.

But this didn't appear to be an inside job. Chairman Torres and the leadership wouldn't have negotiated such a compromise in the first place knowing that it would be sabotaged, would he? It made things so much worse, I cannot imagine why he would think to do that. And people we talked to afterwards said that the Chairman was genuinely shocked by the turn of events. Once quorum is called, counting must go on; he cannot overturn a bylaw, only a rule. So the die was cast.

Anyone can make a quorum call. The reasons for it can only be speculative on my part. Calitics calls on those who pursued this divisive strategy to subvert small-d democracy and silence the will of the remaining delegates to come forward and explain exactly why they felt the need to do so.

The other thing that must be discussed here is that the underlying structure of the convention lends itself for this kind of thing to happen. Resolutions are done last, and in this example, this was the last resolution discussed. There were less reasons for delegates to stay as the day wore on. If the resolutions are supposed to reflect the spirit of all the delegates, it seems to me that the Party could make a good-faith effort to not make them an afterthought by putting them dead last.

Like I said, resolutions aren't bound with the force of law. But they mean something on at least a spiritual level to a great many activists and people who bring so much energy and effort to the Party. Furthermore, the suspicion that there isn't enough transparency in how the Party does business is already there. This "sour taste" allowed many progressives to believe everything they already wanted to believe. We have an opportune moment in America, where new activists are interested and excited by the prospect of real progressive change, and are getting involved for the very first time. The CDP needs to respect and honor that.

Our next steps in the progressive movement are to continue to work within the system, PRIORITIZE AND UNIFY, connect and communicate and grow, polish up on our Roberts Rules of Order, win more AD elections and County Committee slots, elect candidates that will appoint progressives, sit on the task force that can ensure a 58-county strategy and financial transparency, and make sure that those who would rather stifle debate than lead are held accountable.

Miller on Torres' Radar Screen? Torres Coming to the Blue House?

I'm slightly skeptical, but pleased, at Art Torres' answer to this question.

CMR: What is the 58-County Strategy and how is it going to help us be successful in 2008?

AT: Howard Dean and I worked together on the 50-State Strategy when he was running for Chair of the Democratic National Committee. I was part of an effort to make sure he was elected chair because I felt he would be the most progressive and effective chair, which has proven to be right. It’s taken a little time for us here in California to establish a 58-County Strategy, which I announced in December of 2006, and we’re going to be more incremental given the resources that we have available. But the most important priority for me is a Jerry McNerney seat, the Charlie Brown seat – which will be his seat once he defeats Doolittle – and Gary Miller in Southern California. We’re going to reach out to those communities where we can coordinate with counties with the resources we have available for voter registration and finally to make a mark on those counties that were up to this point considered red, that are now purple or turning blue.

I'm willing to give Torres a chance to live up to this. Miller didn't have an opponent in 2006, but if the CDP says they want to devote resources there, let's see it. Same with Brown in CA-04, and to be fair Torres has previously admitted mistakenly not making this a priority last year. What bothers me is that this 58-county strategy is being discussed on the federal electoral level instead of about local and state legislative races; that's where party-building really begins. As a delegate, I want to work with those leaders in the party who talk about reaching out to all counties. I also want to ensure that they actually go about doing it. That's why I'm supporting the creation of an Audit Committee and a resolution expressing support for a 58-county strategy.

CMR: How do you think the emergence of the netroots and the blogger community as a powerful voice has been helpful to the Democratic Party?

AT: I think it’s the healthiest result we could have imagined. That’s why I will be there honoring the bloggers on Friday night in their support of Charlie Brown and Jerry McNerney’s campaigns (at the "Blue House at the Brew House" fundraiser Friday night in San Diego co-hosted by CMR, California Progress Report, Calitics and fellow California bloggers) because the bloggers are important to our effort to get people moving. The bottom line is: whatever positive efforts other groups out there can do independent from us, I applaud.

I'll be happy to see Art and other party leaders at the event, and I hope he'll continue to show support to our efforts to grow the party.

(I also liked how Torres framed Perata's "Out of Iraq" referendum as a way to back the Governor into a corner, and how he consistently weasels out on his actions regardless of his words. We need more of that. I don't really support Perata's bill because it concedes that we'll still be in Iraq in February 2008. But as a way to get Republicans and the governor on the record, I love it. We don't do enough of that in California; holding Republicans responsible for their votes.)