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.

California Republican Party: No Money, Mo' Problems

You almost wish that the California Democratic Party had a better opponent across the aisle, as it would push them to do better work and not rest on their laurels. Sadly, or fortunately, the state GOP under the "control" of Ron Nehring is comically bad.

An influential Republican donor with ties to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is pressuring the California GOP to overhaul its operations, depicting Chairman Ron Nehring as an ineffective, insular manager apparently more concerned with promoting conservative purity than electing Republicans.

In a four-page letter to Nehring obtained by The Associated Press, Larry Dodge outlines a litany of complaints against the state party, from sinking registration numbers to suspect expenditures by party officers.

"The registration gap (with Democrats) is widening, contributions are drying up, key posts have been left open for a year, staff is being laid off and there is a never-ending string of reports which is causing long-term damage to the image of the party," Dodge wrote in the Jan. 31 letter.

"Immediate comprehensive action is required," Dodge writes. "The stakes are too high, the problems too deep, to do otherwise."

This should be a great year for state Democrats. The Republican brand is tarnished, we just saw primary turnout among Democrats double the GOP, there are open seats in competitive legislative seats where the Democrats have solid candidates and natural advantages, we're about to nominate a game-changing candidate who will bring their own set of new voters to the polls, and the CRP is broke. Flat broke. Like $3.4 million in debt with only $3.2 million cash on hand.

The question is whether the CDP, which is in good financial shape, will press this advantage and set things up for a capturing of 2/3 of the legislature and the governor's mansion by 2010, and the ability to enact a wide-reaching progressive agenda. With competition like this, it should be child's play.

Frank Russo has a lot more.

The Great Northern Menace

The California Republican Party, they of the anti-illegal immigration platform, have decided that some immigrants are here to do the jobs that Americans won't do - like be their deputy political director.

The California Republican Party has decided no American is qualified to take one of its most crucial positions -- state deputy political director -- and has hired a Canadian for the job through a coveted H-1B visa, a program favored by Silicon Valley tech firms that is under fire for displacing skilled American workers.

Christopher Matthews, 35, a Canadian citizen, has worked for the state GOP as a campaign consultant since 2004. But he recently was hired as full-time deputy political director, with responsibility for handling campaign operations and information technology for the country's largest state Republican Party operation, California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring confirmed in a telephone interview this week.

That's not all, look at the guy who hired him:

Matthews was hired by Michael Kamburowski, an Australian citizen who was hired this year as the state GOP's chief operations officer. But neither new official has experience in managing a political campaign in the nation's most populous state -- and as foreign citizens, neither is eligible to vote.

In fairness to the state GOP, I don't think any Americans really WANT to work for them.

What's funny is that this has caused a bit of outrage on the xenophobic right.

"it's insulting but also embarrassing ... to bring people from the outside who don't know the difference between Lodi and Lancaster ... and who can't even vote," said Karen Hanretty, a political commentator and former state GOP party spokeswoman [...]

"There are talented Republicans in California, and the message that (party chair) Ron Nehring is sending is that there's no talent pool here," Hanretty said.

The state party and its 58 county operations face several challenges, Hanretty said, including "redistricting on the ballot, uncertain legislative races ahead of us ... and a number of Republican congressmen who are under federal investigation and are going to be challenged by Democrats."

"Who will help these candidates?" she asked. "A couple of foreign transplants who don't know the political landscape and don't know the history of the complicated politics in California?"

Apparently anyone from Australia or Canada isn't able to, you know, read a map. Or a book on California politics.

The crackup on the right over immigration is so gratifying, because at every turn they run into contradictions and hypocrisies like this. I half-expect to see calls to build a fence around Australia in response to this.