First off, there won't be any results from the CA-10 race until 10:00 p.m. As reported by Lisa Vorderbrueggen, the registrars in the district have been ordered by Gov. Schwarzenegger to hold the results until CA-10 first responders who are serving away from home on the fire lines in San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and Mariposa Counties have had an opportunity to vote. Since they have until 10:00 to cast their votes, the running tallies will not be posted until then.
Of course, the regular polls close at 8:00, and the registrars will immediately commence with counting votes just as if there were no hold. So look for the first results, when they come at 10:00, to be fairly complete. Tonight there will be no hitting "refresh" for updates, no cheering if the numbers shift a little bit. Instead, just look for pretty much one big information dump.
Thank goodness this election is almost over. The anonymous videographer known as midwestpinch1 is back with what we can only hope is the last video in the race.
If you're in the district and you watch cable, you may have noticed that John Garamendi has tweaked his TV spots in recent days. His "On Healthcare" commercial has been modified -- gone are the opening and closing "yee-haw" segments where he canters up on horseback. In their place are family scenes with his wife and grandchildren. You've got to give the guy credit -- it only took him five months of running and a LOT of mockery before he realized that the rugged rancher image was totally laughable in CA-10.
Now he's out with his closer for GOTV weekend, a recitation of his endorsements from the conservative editorial boards of the local papers. You can catch the new opening here.
And I have a question. If you're endorsed by a news conglomerate, is it just a little dishonest to quote from the same endorsement but cite the different mastheads under which it was published, thereby implying a wider base of endorsers? Just wondering...
The mystery videographer known as midwestpinch1 is at it again, this time with a video about John Garamendi's support for the mistreatment of farm animals.
As a side note, I recently got a phone call from the Garamendi campaign. When I questioned the caller about Garamendi's stance on the humane treatment of farm animals, he made no apologies and, instead, defended Garamendi's position on Prop. 2 by citing a UC Davis study which claimed that allowing animals to move freely in their cages would raise the cost of eggs to and cause egg farmers to go out of business.
So apparently Garamendi and his campaign have decided that they're good with being at odds with over 65% of the voters in CA-10.
KTVU Political Editor Randy Shandobil reported on the CA-10 race on last night's Channel 2 News...
It's kind of amazing to see the impunity with which Garamendi offers up a lie that can be (and is) easily debunked by a good reporter, and then responds, "So what's the point?"
The Bay Area News Group (Contra Costa Times, Tri-Valley Herald, etc.) yesterday endorsed John Garamendi in the CA-10 race (although it's not online). Of course, Garamendi wasted no time in sending out an email crowing about the endorsement. What's interesting about the email, however, is what Garamendi omitted.
Here's Garamendi's email, with his excerpt from the endorsement:
Garamendi is our choice for the 10th Congressional District
THE DEPARTURE of Ellen Tauscher as representative of the 10th Congressional District to serve in the Obama administration has left a void that will be a challenge to fill.
The diverse district, which runs from Fairfield through much of Contra Costa County and into southern Alameda County, has become increasingly Democratic.
It is heavily favored to elect a Democrat to replace Tauscher, especially without a Republican officeholder seeking the seat.
Among the five Democrats running are three state officeholders: Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier and Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan.
Of the three, only Garamendi has experience working in Washington, D.C., as deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior in the Clinton administration. Garamendi also has broad experience in state government with two years in the Assembly and 14 years in the state Senate. He twice was elected as California Insurance Commissioner, where he helped make significant consumer reforms.
Of all 14 candidates, we believe Garamendi has the right combination of experience, knowledge of key issues and dedication to serving the public interest that make him the best choice to fill Tauscher's seat.
With eight years' experience as insurance commissioner, Garamendi has valuable knowledge needed to make informed decisions about health care reform. As a rancher and with service in the federal Department of Interior, he has credibility with agricultural interests and environmentalists, which puts him in a favorable position to work on critical water issues that affect the Delta.
Garamendi lives on the edge of the 10th Congressional District, but has considerable knowledge about the area, expertise on issues affecting the region, and is not beholden to special interests.
Tauscher's replacement will be going to Congress at a critical time, with major issues confronting the nation, including economic recovery, health care, energy, the war in Afghanistan and reform of financial institutions. The 10th Congressional District needs someone with broad experience and dedication to the public interest. We believe John Garamendi best meets those criteria.
And here's the part of the endorsement that the Garamendi campaign probably didn't want its Democratic supporters to see:
We have serious questions about [DeSaulnier's] commitment to the public interest independent of acceding to the wishes of organized labor, particularly public employee unions.
Many of the financial problems that afflict Contra Costa County today stem directly from decisions DeSaulnier championed while he was supervisor. Most notably, in 2002, at a time when the county faced a $31.5 million shortfall, was already laying off workers and was already experiencing increased public employee pension costs, DeSaulnier supported unsustainable pension increases that hiked benefits for public safety workers by as much as 50 percent.
The plan allowed public safety workers to retire at age 50 with a pension worth 3 percent of their salary for each year served.
Such excessive public employee union benefits have strained some local jurisdictions to the brink of bankruptcy. Indeed, bankruptcy, which would allow the rewriting of unaffordable employee contracts, might be the only way out for some jurisdictions. But Democratic legislators, DeSaulnier and Buchanan among them, have backed an effort to remove the use of local government bankruptcy. They are pushing Assembly Bill 155, which would require state approval of such bankruptcies, severely diminishing local control of fiscal policy.
Now, the Bay Area News Groups is owned by MediaNews Group, whose founder and owner is one William Dean Singleton. It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that Singleton is rabidly anti-union -- witness the editorial screed that his flagship paper, the Denver Post, published on Page One, above the fold, when Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter signed an executive order allowing collective bargaining for Colorado's state employees. So it's hardly shocking that Singleton's hatred for public employee unions would be reflected in BANG's endorsements.
Here's the problem that I see. Making no bones about their anti-union prejudice, BANG's editorial board has "serious questions about [DeSaulnier's] commitment to the public interest independent of acceding to the wishes of organized labor, particularly public employee unions" but in the same breath claims that "We believe Garamendi has the right combination of experience, knowledge of key issues and dedication to serving the public interest."
So BANG has set up a political equation where public employee unions are the antithesis of the public interest. According to their logic, because DeSaulnier supports those unions, he is disregarding the public interest. But if you apply that equation to BANG's comments about John Garamendi, then logically, his dedication to serving the public interest must necessitate that he has repudiated the public employee unions.
And that raises the question of exactly what was said by Garamendi in his interview with the BANG editorial board. How did he convince an editorial board that he was dedicated to serving the public interest when that same editorial board clearly believes that public employee unions are damaging to the public interest? Could it have been that part about him not living in the district, so he's not "beholden to special interests"? Because that sure sounds like some ugly code to me.
Will Harper over at SF Weekly went on a pretty funny rant today about the sort of pathetic attempt by the SF Bay Guardian to exert its "influence" in the CA-10 race via its endorsement of John Garamendi:
The Bay Guardian loves to complain about a certain Chronicle columnist from Walnut Creek criticizing San Francisco policies. The Guardian essentially contends that suburbanites cannot be expected to understand the complexities of life in a teeming urban metropolis. Don't you get it, Suburb Boy? Being mugged by a homeless crackhead in the Tenderloin or shot by an East Bay club-goer in North Beach is what makes this a world-class city!
This isn't anything new for the Guardian; the paper has been butting into East Bay politics for decades even though its editors often have no clue about bridge-and-tunnel life. Three years ago, for instance, the Guardian recommended that Andy Katz be re-elected to the EBMUD board and that Courtney Ruby replace Roland Smith as "county auditor." The problems with those endorsements: Katz had never been on the EBMUD board so he couldn't be re-elected and Ruby was running to be Oakland's city auditor.
What's now new is the advanced level of hypocrisy. The Guardian has been ranting ad nauseam lately about the illegitimacy of out-of-towners' opinions about the city. So how is the Guardian weighing in on a suburban race any different? Yeah, we're sure the "suburban twits" were waiting for the editors of San Francisco's radical alt-weekly to tell them how to vote.
What's especially funny about the Bay Guardian's endorsement and indicative of how little relevance it has in CA-10 is the fact that two of the three front-runners (Joan Buchanan and Mark DeSaulnier) didn't even bother to show up for an interview with the SFBG's editorial board.
So when the SFBG says "Garamendi has a forceful presence, progressive values, long relationships with key power brokers and knowledgeable advocates, and an unmatched history of intensive work on the most pernicious problems that Congress is now wrestling with, including health care reform and resource issues," what they really mean is, "He's the only one who would talk to us."
Not to be outdone by the other candidates in CA-10, John Garamendi also released a new ad today. And although his first ad, "Proven," is what's still airing on local cable, John Garamendi's campaign is now promoting this third commercial entitled "On Health Care."
I guess the galloping-up-on-the-horse thing is working so well for "rancher" John Garamendi that he decided to devote both the beginning and the ending of his ad to the horse footage. Yee-haw! The rest of the commercial consists of Garamendi offering the following earnest, if incoherent, message:
Voiceover: Lt. Governor and Congressional candidate John Garamendi on health care.
Garamendi: We know that the more we spend, the more uninsured we have. We know that we're not getting the efficiency or the effectiveness that we must have to have the health care that all of us need so our families can thrive, so that our children can get educated, and so that this environment that I grew up in will be here for the next generation.
I'm John Garamendi and I approved this message. And I'll fight for quality health care.
What an epic non sequitur. You know, I support health care reform as much as the next progressive, but even I think it has its limitations. Maybe I just have a stunted imagination, but I fail to see how improving health care will educate our children or protect the environment. But I guess that's why John Garamendi's running for Congress -- because he's got the big vision. Health care Garamendi-style: it will teach the kids and save the trees. But can it rope a cow?
Do these sound like epithets you've heard applied to John Garamendi in the race for CA-10?
"He's just a career politician looking for his next job."
"Ten political campaigns, 26 years in the Capitol."
"He has run for Assembly, Senate, State Controller, Governor, and Lt. Governor. Now he's running for Congress"
"He's a carpetbagger."
"He doesn't understand the issues and the people of the district."
Well, while they may certainly be applicable to Garamendi, those are actually all charges that were leveled against Tom McClintock in last year's CA-04 Congressional race against Charlie Brown. In fact, those are charges that were mostly made by Charlie Brown himself. That's why I was totally gob-smacked by Charlie Brown's endorsement of John Garamendi last Monday.
But it's not just the hypocrisy.
You'd think that a guy like Brown, who spent three years running an almost single-issue campaign based on veterans and their treatment, might have been inclined to toss his endorsement to the sole Democratic veteran in the race, Anthony Woods, who served two tours of duty in Iraq. But Brown has given Woods the cold shoulder. I don't know... maybe there's some weird military rivalry thing -- Air Force Academy vs. West Point. Or maybe Charlie Brown hit his head recently and is suffering from amnesia. Go figure.
Some of you may remember the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act on which Californians voted last November. Proposition 2 specifically banned three methods of housing livestock that are widely considered to be inhumane and unhealthy: veal crates, gestation crates for pigs, and battery cages for chickens. In essence, Prop. 2 said that henceforth, farm animals must be kept in a manner that allows them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.
The residents of CA-10 voted overwhelmingly (65.6% - 34.4%) to do away with these barbarous animal cages. But one of the people who now wants to represent us in Congress stood tall in opposition to Proposition 2. That would be "rancher" John Garamendi.
Here's a brief rundown of the three types of cages that John Garamendi thinks should be used in California.
Veal Crates
Veal calves are taken from their mothers immediately after birth and spend the entirety of their short 14-week life "confined in veal crates, usually measuring 2-feet-wide, [where they] cannot turn around, stretch their limbs, or even lie down comfortably."
Gestation Crates for Pigs
A gestation crate, also known as a sow stall, is a 7 ft by 2 ft metal enclosure used in intensive pig farming, in which a female breeding pig (sow) may be confined during pregnancy, and in effect for most of her adult life. [...]
[E]ach pregnancy last[s] four months, with an average of 2.5 litters every year. Sows, which can weigh 600 lbs, spend most of their three or four years of adult life in crates, giving birth to between five and eight litters. As the sows grow larger, they no longer fit in the crates, and must sleep on their chests, unable to turn, until they are slaughtered.
Battery Cages for Chickens
Animal welfare scientists have been critical of battery cages because they do not provide hens with sufficient space to stand, walk, flap their wings, perch, or make a nest.
Let me repeat that. Last November, Prop. 2 was approved by voters in CA-10 by a margin of 197,258 to 103,294 or 65.6% - 34.4%. John Garamendi opposed it. Yet he thinks we should send him to Washington, DC to represent us. Are you confused yet?
John Garamendi's first commercial in the CA-10 Congressional race, "Proven," is already airing on cable news outlets in CA-10.
Garamendi's second commercial, "Leader" is apparently a coming attraction.
You know, Carhartts and cow ponies might resonate in Garamendi's home district of CA-03, but in the highly suburban CA-10... I don't know; it just comes across as so John Kerry.
Well, there's new polling data in the CA-10 race that's been released by the John Garamendi campaign. Predictably, Garamendi's polling shows him with a double-digit lead (just barely). Here's the quick summary:
Candidate
Initial
After Positive Bio
John Garamendi
31%
36%
Mark DeSaulnier
21%
22%
Joan Buchanan
17%
20%
Anthony Woods
9%
9%
David Harmer (R)
5%
7%
Adriel Hampton
1%
0%
Undecided
17%
8%
Phone survey of 400 likely voters, Democratic and DTS , conducted 8/2-8/4, MoE 4.9%
The Garamendi campaign hasn't made the crosstabs public, so this poll raises almost as many questions as it answers. But I just can't shake this feeling of déjà vu when I look at these numbers. They make me think of another recent primary race: the Virginia governor's race last June. Of course, I could be totally wrong about this, but the similarities are striking.
You've got the late entry with big name recognition, lots of fundraising ability, and an endorsement from former President Bill Clinton in his back pocket -- that would be Terry McAuliffe. Then you've got the guy who started off as the presumed front-runner (before McAuliffe jumped in), Brian Moran. And you've got Creigh Deeds, who was bringing up the rear, running as a moderate. Three weeks out from election day, a DailyKos/Research 2000 tracking poll showed the following results:
May 18-20, 2009
Terry McAuliffe
36%
Brian Moran
22%
Creigh Deeds
13%
Undecided
29%
But a mere three weeks later, after Moran launched a series of negative attacks on McAuliffe which ended up bloodying both McAuliffe and Moran, Deeds swept to victory.
June 9, 2009 Election Results
Creigh Deeds
49.76%
Terry McAuliffe
26.43%
Brian Moran
23.79%
All of which is a kind of fancy way of saying, "Who knows?"
For the DeSaulnier campaign's response, flip it...
So absentee ballots arrived in today's mail. Here's the lowdown. First, the order of appearance on the ballot is as follows:
ANTHONY WOODS
Democratic
Economic Policy Analyst
DAVID HARMER
Republican
Independent Businessman
ADRIEL HAMPTON
Democratic
Investigator
GARY W. CLIFT
Republican
Retired Peace Officer
JEREMY CLOWARD
Green
College Instructor
MARK DESAULNIER
Democratic
Senator
JEROME "JERRY" DENHAM
American Independent
Insurance Agent
DAVID PETERSON
Republican
Accountability System Owner
JOHN GARAMENDI
Democratic
Lieutenant Governor/Rancher
JOHN TOTH
Republican
Physician
MARY C. MCILROY
Peace and Freedom
MARK LOOS
Republican
Small Business Owner
JOAN BUCHANAN
Democratic
Assemblywoman
CHRIS BUNCH
Republican
Small Business Owner
Along with the ballot, voters received a Voter Information Pamphlet, which contains the ballot statements for the candidates. Worth noting is that Democrat Adriel Hampton failed to submit a statement to the Registrar's office, and he was not included in the pamphlet. Hampton joins Republican Mark Loos and the Green, American Independent, and Peace & Freedom candidates, none of whom appear in the pamphlet. Also worth noting is that while all five Republicans who appear in the pamphlet listed their websites, Anthony Woods is the only Democrat who directed voters to his website for more information.
Conventional political wisdom holds that the ballot statement is the single most important component of a campaign -- it is the means by which many, if not most, voters will select their candidate. Also critical is the position on the ballot itself (the closer to the top, the better).
Anthony Woods would seem to be the best served by his slot at the top of the ballot and his page 3 ballot statement. Joan Buchanan is stuck near the bottom of the ballot, but the fact that her ballot statement leads on page 1 of the Voter Information Pamphlet should help her overcome the ballot position to some extent. That leaves Mark DeSaulnier stuck in the upper middle and John Garamendi in the lower middle of the pack, both ballot-wise and pamphlet-wise. That positioning could cost both DeSaulnier and Garamendi, if you believe all that conventional wisdom stuff.
You can read the Democratic ballot statements in their entirety on the flip...
Before I get all wound up here, I'd like to start with a not insignificant disclaimer. I do not support Joan Buchanan. In fact, I view her as being dangerously close to a clone of Ellen Tauscher, with her much-vaunted "follow-through" and "pragmatism" really just being code for a big-business background, corporate outlook, and a willingness to concede points before she even arrives at the table. But that being said, she is running the best and smartest campaign I've seen in a long time, and I'm afraid that she's leaving her competition in CA-10 in the dust.
Much has been made of the fact that Buchanan's fundraising was anemic for the second quarter and that she's only in the game because she lent her campaign $250,000 (which she can easily afford). But I'd argue that her approach to financing her campaign was nothing short of genius. If you've ever been to a campaign training seminar, the first rule you may have heard is this: "Campaigns have three finite resources: Volunteers, money, and time. How you manage these three resources will be the difference between winning and losing."
Well, by taking the issue of money off the table in one fell swoop, Buchanan freed up herself and her campaign to focus on the other two resources.
Buchanan had an army of volunteers who worked for her just a few short months ago, and many of them are enthusiastically on board for this run as well. Added to that is a phalanx of paid canvassers (her FEC report showed that she was paying 30 staffers as of June 30). So it shouldn't really come as that much of a surprise that Buchanan's campaign had knocked on 20,000 doors by July 1.
But what is stunning is that the Buchanan campaign has continued to ramp up its canvassing program. Last week, they blew past the milestone of 55,000 doors knocked. On the Saturday before last, with temperatures hovering over 100, Buchanan had 54 canvassers out going door to door.
Yesterday, DailyKos diarist Fenric posted a diary about his/her encounter with a Joan Buchanan canvasser who showed up at the front door. The crux of the diary was that when Fenric questioned the canvasser about how Buchanan intended to vote on the California budget, the canvasser brightly assured him/her that Buchanan intended to support the atrocity that's been wrought by the Big 5. Fenric then declared his/her intention to never vote for Buchanan ever, ever again. All well and good.
That is, until Garamendi staffer SPD waded into the comment thread to gratuitously trash Garamendi's opponents, Mark DeSaulnier and Joan Buchanan, on unrelated issues. And without identifying himself as a Garamendi staffer.
Of course, what makes it really funny (or maybe just pathetic) is that this staffer mocked a reference to Buchanan's "grassroots campaign" as he was astroturfing the netroots on Garamendi's behalf.
So the FEC reports came out last week, and political junkies of all stripes spent hours sifting through them. If you've never done it before, it's a little like searching through your Great-Aunt Lois's basement trying to piece together the untold stories of her life. Now, I'd assume that most readers here have already seen the bare numbers, but just to be complete, I'll include them.
Candidate
Contributions
Distributions
Cash on Hand
Debt
Joan Buchanan
$63,865
$134,419
$179,289
$307,659
Mark DeSaulnier
$209,779
$72,769
$136,510
$77,131
John Garamendi
$300,463
$40,319
$260,144
$54,762
But as usual, it's the stuff inside the report that's most interesting: who's contributing and how the money's being spent. On the flip...
It turns out that a fellow by the name of Jason Bezis must be on the same wavelength as Progressive Sundae. On the same day last week that this blog questioned the legality of Ellen Tauscher's endorsement of Mark DeSaulnier, Bezis, a lawyer from Lafayette, filed a 17-page complaint with the State Department vis-à-vis that endorsement. Citing much of the same material as the PS post (the State Department cable banning political endorsements by presidential appointees, the prominent Tauscher endorsement on DeSaulnier's website, and the campaign brochure that features Tauscher on three of its four pages), Bezis requested the following remedy:
I believe that the State Department Legal Adviser, State Department Inspector General and/or another responsible entity (e.g., Office of Special Counsel division that enforces the Hatch Act) should require Undersecretary Tauscher to repudiate her endorsements of all candidates for partisan political office, especially in election races that are now underway. Her statement should specifically state, "I neither endorse nor oppose any candidate in the special elections of September 1, 2009 and November 3, 2009 for California's 10th Congressional District, notwithstanding any of my previous statements. I instruct all candidates for those elections to cease and desist from use of my name and likeness in campaign advertisements, broadcasts, campaign literature, and similar media where they state or imply that I have endorsed or opposed their candidacies."
So there's a lot of interesting reading in the FEC reports that were filed yesterday, and I'll be posting tidbits and thoughts from those filings soon. But here's the big one that jumped out at me.
Listed under the heading of "Debts and Obligations," is an item showing that John Garamendi's Congressional campaign owes $1005.72 to Black Diamond Graphics for "campaign volunteer and staff shirts." A very little checking with Black Diamond Graphics reveals, though, that "Well, it's really hard to find tee-shirts that are made in America. There are only one or two companies left that still manufacture clothing in the USA, and they're real expensive." Fancy that. Oh, and as far as the screen printing and embroidery services that it offers, no, Black Diamond Graphics is not a union shop.
Now, they do have the advantage of being located in Calaveras County, in John Garamendi's home district -- oh, wait. That's CA-03.
But seriously, if you are involved in local Democratic politics in any way, shape, or form, you probably know that there's a wonderful union shop over the hill in Berkeley where everything is union-made -- it's called Alliance Graphics. Sure their goods are more expensive. That's because they buy union-made materials and treat their workers with dignity -- something that in most circles is considered to be a strongly-held Democratic value.
But the message that I'm receiving from John Garamendi is that he wants to go to Washington, DC to fight for Democratic values and American jobs; he just doesn't believe in putting his money where his mouth is.
Yesterday, DailyKos 
