— There’s a nice little tete a tete on the California Primary on Webmaster Ruffini’s site. One of the Simon backers said: “There is still no reason for us to compromise what we believe in just to get some guy elected” but modified his stance a little later on: “Now there will never be a candidate who is 100% in alignment with me. Consequently I will have to balance issues and find the candidate who is most in alignment with what is most important to me.”
To which yours truly sagely opined: “Right Michael, in grown-up politics we never get 100% of what we want, so we balance the pros and the cons and see if a particular candidate will move us closer to the goal, or not. But we also have to acknowledge that a candidate who promises 100% and then doesn’t deliver, because he lied to us, is no better than a candidate who promises 100% and then doesn’t get elected, because we lied to ourselves.”
Simon’s off on the right foot on day one of the post-primary campaign, talking with liberal talk radio host Ronn Owens in San Francisco. Owens has said he’ll vote for anybody but Davis, and Simon is tapping into that vast well of Davis-hate that exists among liberals across the state (with good reason.) Putting Gray in a vise between the extreme left and the extreme right is a cute trick – counter-triangulation, the antidote to the cynical centrism of Toesuck Morris and his clients.
Reagan had a certain appeal to the left, odd as it may seem, because he came across all soft and furry. Simon’s a far cry from Ronnie in the charisma department, but the persona of a guy who wouldn’t eat a Chihuahua even if he was starving wouldn’t be a bad thing for him to cultivate.