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| Calif. GOP primary winners look headed for defeat |
| 2010-06-10 |
| The good news for Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina here in California was that they won their Republican primaries. The bad news was that they had to run in Republican primaries. Whitman, now the GOP nominee for governor, and Fiorina, the GOP nominee for senator, dispatched their nearest primary rivals by margins of better than 2 to 1. Each spent a queen's ransom to do so -- in Whitman's case, close to $80 million of her own money -- but both former CEOs have plenty left over to take on their Democratic opponents this fall: in Whitman's case, Jerry Brown, the once and, he hopes, future governor; in Fiorina's case, incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer. But California Republican primaries have a nasty habit of rendering their winners unelectable in November, and this year's contest looks like it will be no exception. To win, Whitman and Fiorina -- conventional conservative business Republicans both -- had to take positions so far to the right that their chances of winning a state in which Barack Obama commands a 59 percent approval rating are slim. During one debate with her Republican opponents, Fiorina affirmed the right of suspected terrorists on no-fly lists to buy guns, presumably lest the gods of the National Rifle Association strike her dead on the spot. At a campaign event at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday, Boxer, never one to let a hanging curveball go unswatted, contrasted Fiorina's guns-to-terrorists stance with her own co-authorship of a law allowing pilots to carry guns in cockpits. But the issue most damaging for Whitman and Fiorina is immigration. Pressed by their GOP primary opponents and the Republican electorate to endorse Arizona's draconian new law, Fiorina proclaimed her support for it while Whitman countered the charges from her right that she was soft on immigration by affirming that she was "100 percent against amnesty" and demanding a huge increase in border enforcement. To bolster her credibility, her ads featured former Republican governor Pete Wilson -- champion of 1994's Proposition 187, which would have denied all public services, including the right to attend primary and secondary schools, to illegal immigrants. Wilson won reelection in 1994 by backing 187, which the courts subsequently struck down. But his victory was probably the most pyrrhic in modern American politics. Threatened and enraged by 187, California's Latino immigrants began naturalizing, registering and voting in record numbers. Southern California's Latino-led labor movement -- the most energized and strategically savvy labor movement in the nation -- became particularly adept at turning out Latino voters for Democratic candidates and causes. In the process, the California electorate has been transformed -- moving the state decisively into the Democratic column. In the 1994 election, according to the nonprofit William C. Velasquez Institute, which seeks to raise minorities' political and economic participation, Latinos counted for 11.4 percent of California voters. By 2008, they comprised 21.4 percent. And particularly when immigration is an issue, theirs is a heavily Democratic vote. "There's a whole generation of Latino voters who don't believe the Republicans look out for them," Maria Elena Durazo, who heads the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, told me on Election Day. "We ran against Pete Wilson for years after he was out of office. And, voilà ! He's back -- he's vouching for Whitman!" Labor will make sure the Latino community knows it. Already, the California Nurses Association is running an ad on Spanish-language radio that splices in a clip from a Whitman primary commercial in which she and Wilson discuss cracking down on immigration. When your own primary ad is directed against you by your opponents in the general election, you have a fundamental problem. It's not just that Republican nativism pushes perhaps a fifth of the electorate into the Democratic column. It's that the state's Republicans are simply far to the right of the majority of Californians -- so much so that they do not have a majority of registered voters in any one of the state's 53 congressional districts. There's a reason Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only Republican elected to a major statewide office in California since 1994 -- and it's not his celebrity status. It's because, when he was first elected governor, he did not have to run in and win a Republican primary: He was elected in a special recall election open to candidates and voters from all parties. Whitman and Fiorina had no such luck. In winning their nominations, they said things deeply offensive to a fatally large swath of California voters. Their campaigns may be gold-plated, but they have ears of purest tin. |
| Posted by:GolfBravoUSMC |
| #8 CA voters will do what they always do and vote democrat; and hope the fed bails them out before bankruptcy. Most CA voters will feel it is their only chance since most of the state is under-employeed (or unemployable based on the previous comments related to education) or they are dependent on the state for wages, pension or handouts. The most capable have been leaving CA for years and now the great recession has just acclerated the process. |
| Posted by: airandee 2010-06-10 18:07 |
| #7 So, liberals and sanctuary cities doesn't lead to prosperity? What? This is an outrage! |
| Posted by: Jefferson 2010-06-10 17:00 |
| #6 I don't know whether Meg or Carly will dare to state the obvious: CA public schools' decline into the worst in the nation is almost entirely the result of the tsunami of illegals. Go regress the school performance data (google STAR test, California) against ethnicity, income etc and you'll see that the obvious driver of sh*tty performance is the % of hispanics-- who fail at rates in the 75-80% range-- in the school surveyed. When more than HALF of the kids in CA are drawn from a demographic that doesn't give a $hit about academic achievement, there is no amount of increased spending, or curricular or pedagogical improvements, that can turn things around. And the hispanics' share of CA public school students is RISING at about one percentage point each year. We in CA don't have a school funding problem, or a teachers' union problem, or a curriculum problem. We have a Mexican underclass problem. This is an example of political decadence: a crisis that is so obvious, whose causes are so unpleasant to the reigning political mindset, that none dare call it by its proper name. |
| Posted by: lex 2010-06-10 16:06 |
| #5 lex, this is precisely I am so furious at politicians like McCain and Fiorina. They should have been screaming bloody murder the whole time that California was being overrun by illegal aliens but instead they acquiesced to it. And now they wonder why they can't win an election here. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2010-06-10 16:04 |
| #4 This foggy bottom snob forgets that California has at least twice voted overwhelmingly in favor of restrictions on illegal immigrants. In a state wide election where the gerrymandered districting won't skew the results, Californian will flock to the polls for someone willing to put a lid on and end the handouts to illegals. This moonbat has no clue how angry most californians are about illegals. |
| Posted by: James Carville 2010-06-10 15:57 |
| #3 Oh please, this is spin from WaPo's resident far left winger, Harold Meyerson. His entire argument comes down to, The GOP pi$$ed off latinos, and now they're almost 25% of the electorate, so any GOPper is toast. This is a perfect expression of the cynicism and corruption of our political class. Lock up the fastest-growing, and already biggest, electoral bloc by holding the state's economic future and its schools' performance hostage to millions of unskilled, semiliterate or illiterate ilegals from Mexico. Thus are great polities transformed into sinkholes. Read this and weep. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state. Among the changes in California: •In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state. (Table 1a) •Education in California has declined relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving their education levels; as a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country. (Table 1b) •The large relative decline in education in California is a direct result of immigration. Without immigrants, the share of California’s labor force that has completed high school would be above the national average. •There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school. Moreover, one-third (91,000) of the adult immigrants who arrived in the state in 2007 and 2008 had not completed high school.2 •In 1970 California was right at the national average in terms of income inequality, ranking 25th in the nation. By 2008, it was the 6th most unequal state in the country based on the commonly used Gini coefficient, which measures how evenly income is distributed. (Tables 2a and 2b) •California’s income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippi’s in 1970. (Tables 2a and 2b) •While historical data are not available, we can say that in 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the state’s population without health insurance. (Tables 3 and 4) •The large share of California adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population. We need a new political class. |
| Posted by: lex 2010-06-10 14:49 |
| #2 "offensive", "headed for defeat" - said the liberal Washington Post, from the opposite shores of the country. Finger on the pulse. "Nobody we know would vote for these Republicans" Meh |
| Posted by: Frank G 2010-06-10 12:24 |
| #1 writer is biased much? naw. ya think? |
| Posted by: Mike Hunt 2010-06-10 11:12 |