Richard Bennett

— (updated) A couple of days ago, I referred to the “knuckle-dragging Freeper” point of view on the California primary, a reference to Simberg’s statement of solidarity with the Freepers:

The folks over at Free Republic are masticating Ken’s column and spitting it out. Many are making the same points that I do (though in a less genteel way). But then, I like Ken…

Some of the Fox News Blog Squad (ex-king Reynolds, musical Layne, and not quite a Fox-blogger Welch) took my remark as an attack on one of their own, when they really shouldn’t have. To see the Freeper mentality at work, go look at this thread on the Free Republic web site. On election night, I told the Freepers that Gray Davis was the happiest man in California, since he got the candidate, Simon, he felt most able to beat.

The Freeper response was typical: “Crawl back to DemocraticUnderground.com where you belong;” “Red Davis would be well advised not to get too confident;” “You must be very proud of Red Davis;” “…..I checked out your profile, and “There’s no Freeper by that name” showed up on my screen. What happened, Demorat?”; “Why don’t you be honest and just declare the fact that you are a liberal?”; “Republicans want to chose their candidate, not have the party do it for them.”

The response of Free Republic’s owner was to delete my post (number 23 on the thread – look for it) and terminate my account. This is the kind of insularity that cults always use to keep their members protected from reality. At least it won’t be long until their lawsuit concludes and they’ll be out of business.

This segues into a rant on campaign finance reform, which is bad because it empowers the groups at the extremes of the political spectrum, but I don’t have time for that now.

— The Stockton Record points out that the more extreme members of both parties did well Tuesday, partly because of the newly Gerrymandered disctricts. California’s leading man-hater was ecstatic with the results:

Kuehl said she is “very happy” with Tuesday’s results on the Democratic side and fully expects less opposition from the Assembly when “progressive Democratic agenda” bills come out of the Senate.

But Kuehl doesn’t like to call it left-wingers against moderates. She says, rather, that she’s backing traditional Democrats against pro-business candidates who have moved far right of the Democratic agenda of taking care of poor people and protecting workers.

If Kuehl’s happy, I’m not.

A Democratic sweep of statewide offices is a possiblity now that the extreme candidates are in the mix:

Democratic incumbents are running for governor, attorney general, treasurer and lieutenant governor.

Other races, for controller, secretary of state, insurance commissioner and superintendent of public instruction, feature well-financed Democratic contenders.

And that’s from the Orange County Register, no liberal organ.

— Davis and Simon hit the campaign trail big-time yesterday: Simon toured schools across the state and Davis talked to editorial boards. The San Diego Union-Trib ripped him for pitching a hissy fit at some of the tough questions they asked him about the power crisis, eliciting this piece of wonderment:

Surprisingly, Davis offered a pat on the back to Enron, the bankrupt Houston power trader accused of fraud. “Enron was the best of the lot,” he said. “They dealt with us more honestly.”

I suppose he means Enron gave him more money than the others.

The U-T was alone among dailies in not mentioning a demonstration that met Simon in Burlingame, where a group of students carried signs slamming him for his stands on guns and abortion:

A clump of student protesters confronted him in the hallway bearing signs that said, “Pro-Child, Pro-Choice,” “Guns Kill” and “Vouchers Are Not the Solution.”

“We’re going to go back to coat hangers,” said Sara McNamara, 17.

Other papers numbered the “clump” at about 11. Burlingame is the place where the Dr. Mom mentioned below performed a post-natal abortion on her son recently.

Simon faced tough questions from an 11-year-old:

A fifth-grade boy in Sacramento asked Simon what he had ever done in public office before running for governor, a potentially devastating question from an 11-year old to a candidate who has never run for office and rarely even voted.

Unfazed and soft-spoken, Simon explained that he worked for Giuliani. “I put bad people in jail,” he said, explaining his three years as a junior federal prosecutor in the New York area. “Anybody know Rudy Giuliani? He’s the mayor of New York who was there on September 11.” The class nodded in recognition.

Simon can win if he can keep the race focussed on personalities and not policies. In this state, that shouldn’t be too hard.

Incidentally, the 31% turnout for the primary was the lowest in state history. Dan Walters says not to make too many dire extrapolations since this number was so low, but he believes the Frisco machine is losing steam:

The decades-old political alliance between San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and Senate President pro tem John Burton faltered. Their candidates in local elections, including Burton’s own daughter, were largely rejected; Brown was on the losing side of a local ballot measure fight; Burton’s nephew-by-marriage lost a state Assembly bid despite Burton’s strong backing; and voters rejected Burton’s pet cause, a state measure to loosen legislative term limits. The results raise doubts about Brown’s succeeding Burton in the Senate and Burton’s prospects to run for mayor next year.

Welcome to readers from NRO.

—Hugh Hewitt is one of those purists who lives a world of carefully-constructed self-delusions:

By now many will have been persuaded by out-of-state reporters that a Simon victory will be a great win for Davis; that Davis poured millions into beating Riordan; and that a Simon nomination represents a replay of the losing candidacy of Dan Lungren in 1998.

Dan Walters, the Dean of the Sacramento press corps cited below, is very much an in-state reporter, and he makes these points because they happen to be true. Davis did in fact pour $10M into a primary race where he had no serious opposition; Davis did so in order to get Simon on the ballot; and Davis does in fact intend to play the same game that worked so well against Lungren. Californians will vote for optimistic Republicans in statewide races over incompetant Democrats; they’ll even vote for fairly mean ones, like Wilson, who can touch their insecure core. But there’s a limit, and the space where it can be found was best defined by Tricky Dick Nixon when he was embarassed by Pat Brown in the 1962 Governor’s race (prompting Nixon’s famous “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” whine.) Lungren was the son of Nixon’s doctor, so he had the Nixon curse. Simon is the son of Nixon’s treasury secretary, so he’s got it too. Convincing the voters he’s not the second coming of Nixon is going to be Simon’s number one job; number two is convincing them that the race is a referendum on Davis, and he’s just keeping score.

— 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.

— From the Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters

As Simon emerged in the late going as the most likely nominee, an intense debate developed in political circles over whether he had a prayer of ousting Davis, one of the most ruthlessly focused politicians the state has ever spawned. Even as he was spending millions to help Simon to secure the GOP nomination — without admitting it, of course — Davis and his advisers were plotting how to bury him. And, they left little doubt, it would be a replay of Davis’ assault on Dan Lungren, the very conservative Republican nominee for governor in 1998.
…

Simon spokesman Jamie Fisfis said Tuesday night that, “We’re not going to let Gray Davis define Bill Simon. We’re going to define him as the incompetent governor he’s been.”

But it remains uncertain whether someone as well-bred and polite as Simon can become a junkyard dog.

— DailyPundit.com says:

One final thought about Riordan: Even in California, you don’t beat a Democrat with another Democrat.

Actually, you can only beat a Democrat with another Democrat in this state, and it’s been that way for several years now. Perhaps 9/11 changed this dynamic along with all the others.

Someday we’ll have to start examining politicians’ fitness for office and not just their party affiliation. Maybe.

— Some of the stories about the California primaries talk about a race for the Governor’s Mansion. The only one of these we have in California is a state park that no governor has lived in since 1967. The race is for the Governor’s office, a corner spot on the first floor of the capitol. On a related note, Davis isn’t hated by fellow Dems for his policies, it’s mainly a matter of his high-handed personality, his failure to consult, and his willingness to let them take the fall when it benefits him. In other words, it’s personal. Final note, this article on Garry South is a keen take on the power behind the Davis throne.