Survey Says: RN Actually Among LA’s Best

February 9, 2010 by admin | Filed Under California politics, News media, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

In a cheap attempt to gin up its readership, the perpetually unsubscribed LA Times ran a blog article entitled “Who Are LA’s Worst People?,”

Steve Lopez, the author of the article, nominated an “all-star cast of bigots, crooked business barons and dirty politicians.”

Under “M” for Murder, we have Hall of Famers like the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker, the Freeway Killer and Mr. Helter Skelter himself.

But don’t let me influence your vote. Let local historian Joe Scott of the L.A. County district attorney’s office do that.

“Frank Shaw,” said Scott, nominating as most disreputable Angeleno the L.A. mayor who, in 1938, was recalled in the midst of scandals that fueled the imaginations of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy.

Nobody beats former LAPD chief William Parker, said author and former Timesman Bill Boyarsky. “He was the most damaging Angeleno of all time” because of his “us-against-them, all-white, anti-minority attitude. That has done more lasting harm to the city than anything.”

Within that mix Lopez included President Nixon, a decision that seemingly backfired when he opened the comments section for readers to publish their own rankings:

Arnold’s Acrostic

October 30, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under California politics, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

RN sometimes used bad language in private, but what Governor Schwarzenegger did recently was much worse. To get back at a legislator who had taunted him, he inserted an obscene acrostic into a veto message for one of the legislator’s bills.  This act was not a sudden outburst behind closed doors: it was a deliberate and methodical effort to put a dirty word into the permanent public record. And just when we expect the governor and his staff to spend all their time thinking of ways to ease the state’s fiscal crisis, he had an aide take time out to carry out his “prank.”  More here.

Jerry Brown, Bill Clinton, and RN

October 21, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, California politics, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Forty-seven years after his own run for the office, RN is making a cameo in the race for California governor.  The Sacramento Bee reports:

More than a decade before Jerry Brown’s current incarnation as undeclared gubernatorial front-runner, he hit the airwaves of liberal Berkeley radio station KPFA five days a week to speak his mind. What he said then, as he interviewed poets, activists and the likes of leftist icon Noam Chomsky, promises to resurface this coming year as the 71-year-old former governor ponders running for a historic third gubernatorial term. During his three years on the air, Brown repeatedly blamed corporate malfeasance and political corruption for undermining American democracy and even causing deaths, according to edited excerpts of the radio broadcasts.

Brown regularly attacked President Bill Clinton as a lackey for business interests and in one excerpt stated, “I don’t believe Clinton is different from Richard Nixon.“

More excerpts here.

Of course, Brown’s observation was not original.  Many people saw similarities between Clinton and Nixon, including Nixon himself.

You know, he came from dirt and I came from dirt. He lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency, and I lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency. He overcame a scandal in his first campaign for national office and I overcame a scandal in my first national campaign. We both just gutted it out. He was an outsider from the South and I was an outsider from the West.

Obviously, though, Brown did not mean it as a compliment.  That is one reason why Clinton is campaigning for Brown’s primary opponent, Gavin Newsom.

As If You’re There, And Lying!

July 14, 2009 by Joshua Treviño | Filed Under California politics, New Media | Leave a Comment 

This is too late to matter, but I do want to note this peculiar passage in Mark Leibovich’s piece on California’s governance that ran in the New York Times last weekend:

As I waited for Schwarzenegger in the lobby of the governor’s office, I studied the official portraits of former governors, including those of Ronald Reagan, Earl Warren and Jerry Brown (boldly colored and cartoonish and considered so bizarre at the time it was painted that the Legislature initially refused to hang it). Suddenly I heard Schwarzenegger’s unmistakable voice booming joyously as he led an entourage from his office.

The problem here, as anyone who’s been to the California State Capitol knows, is that those portraits are several stories above “the lobby of the governor’s office” — and several hundred feet to the west. If you’re looking at the portraits, you’re not in “the lobby of the governor’s office,” nor even close to it, and you sure aren’t going to hear anything from the Governor’s office — not even “Schwarzenegger’s unmistakable voice booming joyously.” Why would Leibovich include this obviously falsifiable and false detail? It’s a sloppy embellishment that illuminates no point he makes. It does, though, diminish them all.

The rest of the piece is a long exposition by someone writing a book report on California, and it contains the analytic errors one might expect from that exercise: Dianne Feinstein’s “presence” does not actually “hover over the Democratic field”; Tom Campbell does not matter overmuch; et cetera. It’s not the analytic flaws one holds against the author, though, but the falsehoods.

Leaderless

June 12, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, California politics, Republican Party, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

There has been a great deal of talk that the GOP lacks a “main person” who speaks for it. (Google the words “leaderless” and “Republican” and you get more than 30,000 hits.) Whatever the party’s troubles, the lack of a “main person” is not one of them. The United States is not a parliamentary system with a “leader of the opposition.” In our system of federalism, bicameralism, and the separation of powers, the out-party seldom has a single identifiable leader. Nevertheless, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the “leaderless out-party” story is a hardy perennial in the press.  Consider a New York Times editorial on July 27, 1965.  Governor Nelson Rockefeller had just announced that he would not run for president in 1968. (He eventually did.)  The Times lamented:

Even after admitting all the Rockefeller political liabilities, the question persists whether the Republican Party will really be better off now. Can Gov. William W. Scranton of Pennsylvania, Gov. George Romney of Michigan or former Vice President Richard M. Nixon do better? They did not distinguish themselves the last time around and the party remains embarrassingly leaderless. Time may remedy the present deficit, or new faces may appear. The Rockefeller departure could remove an irritant. But it also removes, or largely immobilizes, a chief spokesman for the forward-looking Republicanism that alone as a political philosophy can compete against the Democrats.

The next year, the GOP made a big comeback in the midterm election, including a dramatic victory in the race for governor of California. Readers of this blog know what happened in the 1968 presidential race.

California Split

May 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, California politics, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

The title of this post comes from one of Robert Altman’s less-remembered films (albeit one somewhat more entertaining than, say, Quintet or whatever that futuristic one with Paul Newman was called). Anyway, it seems fitting to borrow it when discussing a blogpost by Martin Hutchinson which has caused some stir in online circles in recent days.

The post proposes solving the Golden State’s myriad problems by dividing it into four separate states. The southernmost would comprise the San Diego area, Orange County, and the Imperial Valley. Greater Los Angeles (that is to say, LA city and county, plus the coastline going up to around Santa Barbara) would be another state. The third state would comprise the Bay Area up to Sonoma, Silicon Valley, the corridor up to Sacramento, and Santa Cruz County. The northernmost part would include the remainder of the state.

This is hardly the first time such notions have been tossed around. In 1860, after the efforts of Southern sympathizers to break off California and Oregon from the Union were frustrated, there was talk of trying to split the southern half of the state from the northern one, but this came to nothing.

And for eight weeks in the fall of 1941, citizens of California’s northernmost counties, in cooperation with some of the residents of Oregon’s southwestern region, participated in rallies calling for the establishment of a separate State of Jefferson. This movement managed to gain national press at the beginning of December, but was promptly forgotten when bulletins arrived about Pearl Harbor, though in recent years several dozen websites have celebrated the movement and called for a reexamination of this particular secession proposal.

Hutchinson’s post is rather sketchy about just how this four-way split would be put into action. The legislative approach he outlines is of questionable constitutionality.

(Indeed, the one state in the USA which definitely has the legal authority to subdivide itself is Texas. The treaty that brought the Texan Republic into the Union in 1845 specified that the state could subdivide itself into as many as five states if it chose. In 1915 there was a movement afoot to have the westernmost part of the Lone Star State break away with El Paso as the capital, and from time to time the residents of the Panhandle or the Gulf Coast mutter in similar style.)

One has to wonder if blogposts like this one make Governor Schwarzenegger nostalgic for the days when the Predator was all he had to worry about.

The President At Notre Dame

May 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, California politics, Congress, Culture, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Lifestyle, Media, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Religion, Republican Party, Supreme Court, Vice President Biden, economy, education | 1 Comment 

Tomorrow President Obama will receive an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s quintessential Catholic institution of higher learning, and will deliver an address to the assembled graduates. The invitation extended by the school’s president has stirred considerable controversy (and plenty of vocal protests) because of the President’s espousal of the pro-choice viewpoint on abortion throughout his career. (It has been noted here and there that other pro-choice politicians like New York’s onetime Governor Mario Cuomo and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan appeared at previous Notre Dame commencements without much incident. But it may have helped that they were lifelong Catholics, unlike Obama.)

The Chief Executive’s appearance tomorrow is an opportunity for him to extend a conciliatory hand to the large number of Americans who, whether or not they voted for him in November, are not supporters of some of the radical programs being espoused by a considerable number of Democratic-affiliated groups, such as an expansion of legal abortion, decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs, and gay marriage.

It seems to become more evident by the month that when voters sought “change” in voting for Obama and Vice President Biden last month, a substantial percentage of them were mainly concerned with the economy, health care, and perhaps increased opportunity of education, and were not that keen on the other aspects of “change” as defined in the agendas of MoveOn.org or other groups. This would especially apply to voters in the states surrounding the Deep South, large portions of the Catholic electorate, and churchgoing African-American voters nationwide.

In California, the voters in the latter group helped Obama carry the state, but at the same time provided the margin that passed Proposition 8 which reversed the California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. And it turns out that on abortion, the percentage of voters supporting Roe vs. Wade and the pro-choice line, after peaking during the Clinton years, has steadily been declining, to the point that this week, a Gallup poll revealed that a bare majority of those whose opinion was sampled – 51% – described themselves as “pro-life.”

This strongly indicates that a considerable number of voters – perhaps poised on becoming the majority – would not be looking forward to Al Franken taking his seat in the Senate and locking in a (theoretically) filibuster-proof majority that would then fulfill all the left’s fondest dreams in the social arena.

The events of the last few weeks involving Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, might prove a harbinger of things to come. A few weeks ago, during the Miss USA pageant, Ms. Prejean, educated at Christian schools, was asked by the online gossip columnist Perez Hilton, one of the pageant’s judges, what her opinion was of gay marriage. The contestant replied that her own view was that marriage could only exist between a man and woman – which is still officially the view of Congress, as expressed in the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a majority of both parties and signed by President Clinton a decade ago.

Hilton (followed by an avalanche of bloggers and left-leaning pundits) subjected Ms. Prejean to ridicule. But instant polls soon made it clear that most Americans supported her right to express her opinion, and even Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who spearheaded the legalization of same-sex unions in his city, acknowledged her right to free speech.

Ms. Prejean was then ridiculed as a hypocrite, after some rather mild and fairly tasteful photos of her in an unclad state appeared online. But Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA pageant, rejected pressure to strip her of her crown, and so in recent days the beauty queen has managed to largely prevail in the court of public opinion.

The way this particular controversy has played out has not been conveniently timed for the supporters of same-sex marriage. As I noted last week in my post “Gay Marriage At The Crossroads,”  the District of Columbia city council just voted to recognize such unions as performed in other states. Under the Home Rule Bill, Congress has a right to challenge this decision – and GOP lawmakers have made it clear that they will pursue this option, which means that in a matter of months each member of Congress will have to vote yes or no on this question.

The issues of abortion, gay marriage, and narcotics delegalization will also be prominent when the President selects a nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. It seems less and less likely that any thoroughly liberal, MoveOn-approved choice would automatically sail through the Senate.

So I think that the best approach for the President tomorrow is not to mouth a series of platitudes predicated on the idea that his listeners (or the American public in general) will automatically accept all of his positions, but to acknowledge that there are differences of opinion and to express a willingness to work within the Constitution to achieve a consensus that will bridge these differences. If he does that, and follows through, he may considerably improve the chances of his party maintaining control of Congress in 2010. If he pursues a partisan path, however, the GOP – perhaps as early as the Virginia election this year – could be on the comeback trail.

Blue Orange?

March 14, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, California politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Orange County, Republican Party, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

(Cross posted from Epic Journey)

Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon, may be on the cusp of political upheaval. In the Orange County Register, Dena Bunis reports:

Orange County Democrats have become so emboldened by how well President Barack Obama did here on election night that as far as they’re concerned they can compete for any seat in this Republican rich environment. Case in point: Irvine Councilwoman and former Mayor Beth Krom. She made it official this week that she is going to take on Republican Rep. John Campbell.

Outside of Southern California, Orange County is synonymous with wealth, glamour (e.g., The OC) and conservative politics. The reality is more complicated. Republicans have generally won there, but in 2008, McCain took the county by a slim 50-48 percent margin. What’s up?

• First, it’s now a majority-minority county, about 33 percent Hispanic, 16 percent Asian, and 2 percent African American.
• Second, while coastal areas are indeed as affluent as the stereotype holds, there are gritty working-class areas farther inland. (I used to live in one of them.)
• Third, it is home to large numbers of high-income professionals, who liked Obama. Nationwide, he won narrowly among voters making more than $200k a year, and by a 58-40 percent margin among those with postgraduate study. As Michael Barone has argued convincingly, The GOP cannot take upscale voters for granted.

Orange County Republicans will have to work hard to keep their turf from turning blue.

Jerrypandering

March 13, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under California politics | Leave a Comment 

Why did the California state attorney general libel pharmacists?