There’s a way to sort of excuse Jerry Brown for joining the partisan witch hunt and investigating ACORN, on the grounds that he is also looking into whether the two wingnut-welfare dress-up clowns who filmed the employees broke the law by taping without mutual consent. It’s somewhat harder to spin away Brown’s attendance at a fundraiser for Republican District Attorney Mike Ramos.
California Attorney General Edmund Brown, Jr. was the guest of honor and introduced District Attorney Mike Ramos at his campaign fundraiser tonight in Ontario. In introducing Ramos, Attorney General Brown said, “Mike Ramos is one of the best prosecutors in California, we served on the statewide Gang and Violent Crime Task Force together … he’s a real fighter.”
It is actually against the bylaws of the Democratic State Central Committee to endorse a Republican in a partisan race. Some members of the DSCC who want to support Republicans actually resign from the party. I’m trying without success to determine whether the DA race in San Bernardino County is a non-partisan race; typically, that is the case.
But there are lots of other reasons that a Democrat running in a primary would not necessarily want to endorse a Republican like Mike Ramos. Beyond the obvious reasons, Ramos has been accused of sexual harrassment by a woman who works in the DA’s office. Ramos has called it an effort to derail a series of investigations against public officials in the county. Ramos has also received $30,000 in donations over the years from the business of Mark Leggio, who was indicted on charges of laundering over-the-limit campaign donations to various other candidates for office. Ramos recused himself from the investigation. Leggio pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison. There’s quite a bit of smoke here.
Between this and partying with the Lincoln Club of San Diego, the point is that Jerry Brown has started to run the general election, appealing to the center-right electorate that he feels wins elections. That may have been true in 1978, but maybe not so much now, given the demographic changes in the state. What’s more, it’s incredibly disrespectful to a Democratic primary electorate that is really being told they have nowhere else to go.
I’m not sure what to make of Brown’s connections here — if they mean he is cozying up to right-wingers and changing his views to suit them, that’s alarming. But if it means that he’s such a strong candidate that he draws support from independents and Republicans, that’s a good thing. Worth keeping an eye on, but based solely on these instances, not much of a problem for him.
As for the Mark Leggio donations: do you have any evidence, or any reason to believe, that the district attorney was aware of any illegality in the donations? If not, that’s an extraordinarily cheap shot — and a bank shot at that, since you are trying to discredit Brown by smearing Ramos.
According to authorities quoted by the Press-Enterprise, none of the candidates who received donations from Leggio “is suspected of any criminal conduct and there was no evidence they had any idea the contributions may have been illegal.”
http://www.columbia.org/pdf_fi…
Whether or not Jerry Brown’s center right focus is savvy or not isn’t the issue for me. I’m looking for a candidate who is absorbing the lessons of the past years, and will govern as a Democrat. Not seeing this in Brown.
We have a similar problem with State Senator Lois Wolk (SD-05). Wolk endorsed two Republicans in the “non-partisan” Fairfield City Council race, John Mraz and Catherine Moy.
If Moy’s name sounds familiar, that’s because she is associated with Move America Forward, the pro-Iraq War group. She and another person were appointed to fill two vacancies on the Fairfield City Council that arose when one council member was murdered and another committed suicide after being convicted of a felony. That is how a city that is 50%+ Democratic ended up with a city council that is 80% Republican. The council is now 60% Republican now that the Mayor left them. (The mayor holds a seat on the five-member council.)
Non-Partisan races are actually partisan in nature because they are the minor leagues of politics. My county political party endorses in non-partisan races.
And the money Ramos can use for his campaign does not have to be spent on his campaign, Sam Clauder a leading Democratic Party activist says there are no strings attached to this money the DA raised with Jerry Brown where it can be spent to the San Bernardino County Republican Party if the DA wanted to.
This story can be damaging to Brown just as much as Whitman donating 3000.00 to Boxer and ENDORSING her.
Governor Moonbean or Crusty the General. This goes some ways toward answering that question.
I don’t know what is going on in Fairfield, but the alignments in nonpartisan elections are usually across party lines. They tend to split with slow-growth Democrats and anti-tax republicans opposing pro growth Democrats who are generally more concerned with jobs and things like low cost housing and pro-business Republicans and it is not unusual for legislators in both parties to endorse nonpartisan candidates who are registered in the other party because of those splits and in fact when I checked about a year ago, I went through 25 members of the Assembly and could find records of all but two having endorsed members of the other party in competitive nonpartisan races where they were opposed by a serious candidate who was a member of the legislators party. As always, elections are still about choosing between individuals, not parties and that is even more pronounced in nonpartisan races.
Our founding fathers including Thomas Jefferson whom for all intents founded our first political party expressed concern in various forms for the idea that parties would be more important in voters decisions that jdugements made by individuals. Jefferson felt that parties were a necessary evil so that there was always a base for outsiders to build on when they wanted to challenge the establishment. Franklin Roosevelt, surely as partisan a Democrat as ever held the oval office stated that any voter was foolish if he made party registration the most important factor in deciding his vote. You can go on and on. Parties are supposed to be an indicator about where a person stands on the issues and a chance for likeminded people to work together to effect change, but it was never intended to be (and in our system of government cannot be) something that overrides the importance of choosing the individual who best represents your point of view.
As for the comment about slow growth candidates not being good democrats, I guess that’s all a matter of opinion. I don’t agree with you, but some people do. However, many if not most of our elected Democrats started their careers as slow growth candidates for local office and if you choose to cut those people out of our party, you are losing most of our leadership (Nancy Pelosi has given speeches comparing neighborhood groups fighting developments with the original American Revolutionaries whom also said, “Enough is enough.”) and an awful lot of voters.
Democrats tend to be united only by the fact that we believe government has a role in solving our problems, but what problems it should solve and how it should solve them are decisions that vary from voter to voter and from elected official to elected official which is why the way the system is really supposed to work is you elect like minded people at your neighborhood level and they represent their views at the next level up, all the way to the top.