You would think you would want the endorsements before GOTV weekend, but the Judy Chu campaign rolled out a series of endorsements in the past 48 hours.  Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (CA-47) endorsed Dr. Chu yesterday and appeared with her at a GOTV rally.  And today, Chu announced endorsements from Congresswoman Diane Watson (CA-33) and the United Farm Workers.  Previously UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta had endorsed Chu, but prior to today, the UFW had endorsed Gil Cedillo, so this is a very surprising reversal.

“Judy Chu has always been a champion and friend to farm workers and working class families everywhere. When farm worker Asuncion Valdivia died after toiling in the extreme heat of the Central Valley for hours on end and was denied adequate medical care by his employers, Judy proposed legislation that would ensure such a tragedy would never happen again,” said Arturo Rodriguez, UFW President. “Today, California’s workers are entitled to mandatory shade, rest, and water breaks thanks to the law Judy helped pass. It is because of her dedication to the health and well-being of our members that the United Farm Workers of America proudly endorse Judy Chu for Congress!”

Considering how late in the game it is, something has to be getting these endorsers off the fence and into Chu’s column, especially with respect to the Farm Workers, who appear to have reversed their endorsement.  Maybe it’s Gil Cedillo’s vindictive, ugly campaign.

I don’t think it will matter to GOTV efforts, but it’s a telling sign when the players start lining up at the very end of the game.

…Sen. Cedillo still has the UFW endorsement on his website.

UPDATE by Dante: The endorsement by UFW is, according to Judy Chu Press Secretary Fred Ortega, a dual endorsement.  The UFW endorsement of Gil Cedillo was not withdrawn.  Said Fred Ortega: “The endorsement is yet another sign of Judy Chu’s crossover appeal, and she is very proud to have the endorsement of the organization founded by Cesar Chavez to protect the rights of predominantly Latino workers.”

First of all, forgive me for not posting an update about the CA-32 race yesterday–I happened to have the honor of being a volunteer driver in Vice President Biden’s motorcade during his recent stay in Los Angeles.  Mr. Dayen did an admirable job of picking up the slack.

In addition, I wish to issue a correction today.  In Wednesday’s roundup, I made a factual mistake in implying that if Judy Chu were to win the CA-32 race, that there would be a special election to replace her.  This is not true.  The California Constitution specifies that in the event of a vacancy on the Board of Equalization, the Governor appoints a replacement subject to the confirmation of a majority of the Assembly and the Senate.  It would be interesting to ask whom Schwarzenegger would appoint in that scenario, as well as to see if the Democratic Legislature would permit the Governor to appoint a Republican to fill a strongly Democratic Board of Equalization district.  In any case, I apologize for the error.

Now then–main event below the flip.

I want the readers of Calitics to understand something perfectly clearly.  As the Editorial Board made clear before I joined it, the editors on this site did not have it as their objective in any way to influence the upcoming election in CA-32 one way or the other, given what was surmised as the quality and depth of the Democratic field in this race.  But Gil Cedillo’s campaign changed that.  We first got a hint of the tack that campaign was taking when his team responded to Mayor Villaraigosa’s endorsement of Judy Chu, and we’ve seen it continue in the negative campaign strategy and apparent sense of entitlement that have been profiled on our site’s coverage of this race.

Now, it seems, Senator Cedillo is pulling out all the stops in this effort.  If you thought it was ugly before…now it’s really ugly.

First, Cedillo’s campaign has dropped yet another negative mailer against Emanuel Pleitez.  According to sources in the Pleitez campaign, this mailer was sent to Latinos in the San Gabriel Valley–and apparently the Cedillo campaign is expecting the targets of this mailer to be English-speakers, because the mailer is not bilingual.  To be sure, I completely understand why the Cedillo campaign would seek to suppress and persuade Pleitez’ home turf of unincorporated East LA, but it’s a different matter to be sending out an English-only mailer to the San Gabriel Valley.  There are two ways to look at this: one is that Cedillo’s campaign is bleeding educated Latino voters in the SGV.  The other is that the Cedillo campaign has so much money left to spend in the days before election day that they figure they may as well.  After all, the mailer is basically a carbon copy of the previous attack against Pleitez–without, of course, the Rosario Dawson photo that gave the campaign a black eye–except with new text, as you can see below.

Click to view attack mailer

Now, last time I checked, Pleitez has been representing himself as a member of the Obama-Biden Treasury Department Transition Team who took that gig after leaving the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs.  I didn’t know he was an unpaid mail room intern!

Well, in something that should come as no surprise, Gil Cedillo’s campaign is lying, and he’s hoping that the voters he’s targeting don’t pick up on that fact.  See, anyone who knows how to use Google would be able to find out relatively quickly that Emanuel Pleitez is listed on change.gov, the official site of the Obama-Biden Transition, as a member of the Treasury Department Review Team, along with 22 colleagues.  Something makes me think that the unpaid mail room interns aren’t listed on change.gov.

As a matter of fact, some of Emanuel’s fellow team members who are listed on that page include some big names in the financial sector, including some who have provided quotes in support of Pleitez’ work on the team as well as his candidacy.  Names like Ed Knight, who used to be General Counsel for the Treasury Department in the Clinton Administration.  As a matter of checking the veracity of the full statement, I contacted Emanuel Pleitez to get the story about whether he was paid or unpaid as a member of the Transition Team.  Pleitez informed me that owing to a budgetary problem with the Transition Team, he was in fact not paid for his work, and left after finishing the performance of his duties to run for CA-32.

The mailer also scorns Pleitez as being merely Mayor Villaraigosa’s driver–and it is hardly a coincidence that a mailer associating Pleitez with Villaraigosa would appear in the mailboxes of voters in the San Gabriel Valley, where the mayor is hardly a popular figure (see the aforementioned response to the endorsement of Chu by Villaraigosa for a taste of that rift).

As part of my conversation with Pleitez, I asked him to provide me the full record of his paid work for Villaraigosa.  According to Pleitez, he worked as a Council Aide in his neighborhood of El Sereno for then-Councilmember Villaraigosa during the second half of 2003, and also worked as a Personal Assistant whose duties included driving, scheduling and advance work for Villaraigosa during his second mayoral campaign culminating in April 2005.

Bottom line is this: the accusation that Pleitez was nothing more than a driver and a “mail-room intern” is atrociously false and misleading.  But we have come to expect nothing less from the Cedillo campaign.

And as much as it pains me to say it, I’m just halfway done.

If the Cedillo campaign has one fatal flaw, it’s one of exaggeration and overkill.  When they attacked Mayor Villaraigosa, they went too far.  When they questioned Pleitez’ character, it backfired.  When they questioned Pleitez’ experience, they distorted the truth in a fashion that would embarrass Baghdad Bob.  The mailers accusing Judy Chu of pay-to-play were misleading, to put it kindly.  And now, the Cedillo campaign is doing its best to cast doubt on the Judy Chu’s loyalty to the United States.  Check out the latest mailer from Cedillo’s camp against Judy:

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There comes a point at which you just don’t know what to say.  The backstory here is that this Helen Leung character donated a certain amount to Judy Chu’s campaign in 2001 and 2002.  In 2003, she was indicted on suspicion of passing classified documents.  So far, we’re in accordance with the mailer here.

But what the mailer doesn’t tell you is that, according to the Chu campaign, her BoE campaign at the time returned the contribution as soon as they found out it came from a tainted source.  But what’s particularly disgusting about this particular piece is that the narrative it builds in attempting to question Chu’s patriotism is itself based on a narrative that has already been debunked.  I reference in particular the second page of the mailer–in particular the last two paragraphs that imply that if Chu was playing pay-to-play with corporate contributors, then she might owe something to Chinese spies!  Problem is, of course, that as has been documented over and over, the pay-to-play allegations are demonstrably false, according to the L.A. Times and the Board of Equalization itself.

The Cedillo campaign must not have much negative to go on against Judy Chu if the best they can do is build a narrative of suspicion of treason based off a returned campaign contribution from seven years ago.  But even richer is the back of the mailer–viewable at link 4 above.  The endorsement quote, from American Liberty Foundation PAC, goes out of its way to further question Judy Chu’s loyalty to the United States.  But what exactly is American Liberty Foundation PAC?

If your first thought was, “wow, that sounds like one of those right-wing think tank groups!”, well, consider your suspicions correct.  If you google “American Liberty Foundation” you’ll get a bunch of links to sites and spinoff organizations that are relatively minor and all support the policies of Ron Paul–such as this one, which used to be a libertarian organization devoted to eliminating the income tax, getting guns for everyone, and documenting the pre-emptive war in Iraq.

The problem is, of course, that “American Liberty Foundation” changed its name to “Downsize DC” in 2004, and the actual search in Google of “American Liberty Foundation PAC” yields no results–though the closest is former Republican Ohio Congressman Bob Ney’s “American Liberty PAC” which funded Republicans in Ohio in 2004 and 2005.  Given the multiple disclosures that are required of PACs who donate to federal campaigns, it is quite surprising to see an official PAC name not return any results on Google, which suggests that the PAC either doesn’t exist, or, if it does, it was very recently formed, given the fact that the FEC’s list of Committees who have contributed to Cedillo’s campaign does not mention anything having to do with “American Liberty Foundation”–as a matter of fact, searching the FEC database for American Liberty Foundation PAC yields no results.

So, the Cedillo campaign is using what is at best a paper PAC to provide a quote for the purposes of impugning the patriotism and loyalty of its chief opponent.

Just when I think that Cedillo’s team can’t stoop any lower into the dregs of moral reprehensibility, there they go.  And, of course, the irony of this campaign using what sounds like a right-wing group to attack the patriotism of a competitor is very rich in irony, given the reputation Cedillo has in certain circles owing to his support (which I agree with, by the way) for rights and protections for the undocumented.

For the record, some members of the Chu campaign are also upset with Emanuel Pleitez for attacking along the same lines at a recent town hall event, using a Ciceronian-style praeteritio to reference the same allegations (cue the 17:00 marker).

Either way, the Cedillo campaign mail strategy is among the most ugly and dishonest I’ve had the misfortune to observe up close.  I can’t wait for this to be over so he can stop destroying his reputation, win or lose.

Five days left to go, and the news continues out of CA-32–mostly recaps and summaries.  And most of these articles are some of the prime examples of just why journalism is suffering–perhaps I should call it “the banality of balance.”  In the attempt to be as even-handed as possible, the truth is often a casualty.  But there are a couple of good, more detailed pieces about the election, which I’d like to highlight below.

For the sake of brevity, go beneath the flip.  I promise it’s worth the click.  There’s a lot of interesting material today.

Before I get started with the main event, I want to point out a couple of things.  First, the Huffington Post is joining a bunch of other publications, online and offline, in giving Emanuel Pleitez very positive coverage.  Regardless of the outcome of this race, there’s a bright future for Pleitez ahead, it would seem.  He’s making a lot of friends and few enemies during this campaign.

And speaking of Emanuel Pleitez: Gil Cedillo was doing an interview with progressive Latino radio host Mario Solis Marich today.  And according to a tweet from Mario, Cedillo defended the controversial mailer against Pleitez by saying that he and Latina actress Rosario Dawson were “glamorizing gang activity” by being photographed flashing the symbol for the nonprofit, nonpartisan voter registration advocacy group Voto Latino.  Memo to Gil Cedillo: if you want to consider it a mistake to flash a symbol for something because of the fact that flashing signs is often associated with gang membership, that’s one thing.  But equating that with “glamorizing gang activity”–which usually amounts to murder, robbery, assault and extortion–is something else entirely.  When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Now then.  Both Roll Call and Politico take up the issue of CD-32 in their online versions today.  Both of these treatments are far superior to the L.A. Times article I scorned yesterday. If you read them, you’re likely to get the same basic information, which could be summarized as follows:

• The district is mostly Latino, but Asians tend to be more active voters.

• Demographics would seem to favor Cedillo, but Chu is a good crossover candidate with good labor support and endorsements from many Latino leaders and electeds.

• Emanuel Pleitez has taken many by surprise by building a strong campaign, but he’ll be a spoiler at best.  Betty Chu might influence things by confusing people.

• Both the Cedillo and Chu campaign has gone negative, and Cedillo’s has gone negative against Pleitez, which indicates that it’s worried about Pleitez’ Latino support.

• Turnout will suck.

• Who will win?  Take a wild guess, and you’ll be as good a prognosticator as anyone.

That’s a fair summary of the race.  What I don’t like about these articles, though, is that neither of them take a stab at evaluating the truth and accuracy of many of the accusations that have been flying back and forth, despite the treatment of those pieces in major media outlets.  You can find a good recap of those issues by reading the Calitics coverage of the CA-32 race.  Nevertheless, both these articles have a couple of interesting tidbits, which I’d like to highlight.

First, Judy Chu’s consultant Parke Skelton was misreported by both articles concerning the percentage of absentee voters of Asian descent–the Roll Call article quotes Skelton as saying that Asians make up 29% of the 12,000 voters that have returned absentee ballots, while the Politico piece quotes Skelton as calculating it at 37% of 10,000.  Thankfully, your intrepid CA-32 correspondent has obtained clarification from Mr. Skelton about this:

The numbers are, about 29% of those already voted are API [Asian-Pacific Islander].  About 37% of the field generated AVs [absentee voters] are API.

The number got mangled by one of the reporters.

The already voteds are heavily PAV [permanent absentee voter], the field generates come in later.

So what does that mean in practice?  It seems to be encouraging for the Chu campaign so far.  As a whole in the district, 29% of those who have already cast ballots are API, and those are heavily permanent absentee voters who are usually active voters.  A field-generated absentee voter is a direct product of campaign activity–getting a voter who is a supporter to register for an absentee ballot and turn it in to make sure that the campaign doesn’t have to worry about GOTV on GOTV weekend and election day.  If, in the whole district, 37% of field-generated votes so far are from the API community–twice the percentage of Asians registered in the district as a whole–it seems to indicate that the Chu campaign is mobilizing its ethnic base effectively with its absentee voter campaign.  To be able to counter this, the Cedillo campaign will need a very effective election-day mobilization strategy.  To their credit, that’s exactly what campaign manager Derek Humphrey promised to Roll Call:

Even without the labor federation endorsement, Cedillo, a former union organizer, has picked up some union support, and Derek Humphrey, his campaign manager, predicted the campaign would have “one of the most aggressive grass-roots [get out the vote] operations in Los Angeles County history.”

Turnout is also strikingly low so far–with 12,000 voters have returned their ballots so far, that’s less than .5% of the 245,000 voters (warning: PDF) that were registered in CA-32 as of the March 20 60-day close report.  My personal opinion is that the low turnout so far bodes well for Judy Chu, and seems to indicate what the two articles are stating: that the higher the turnout is, the more it favors Cedillo owing to simple demographic considerations.

Ethnic appeals in the campaign are also taking center stage, which makes perfect sense in this district.  Quoth Politico:

“The candidate who best identifies who their voters are, and gets them out to cast their ballot will win this thing,” said Allan Hoffenblum, publisher of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan guide that tracks statewide elections. “It’s between Chu and Cedillo as the two main contenders, … and they all agree on the issues, so this race has come down to ethnicity and character.”

True enough.  And, in fact, the Chu campaign is in fact accusing the Cedillo campaign of ethnicity-based campaigning.  From Roll Call:

Chu’s campaign believes Cedillo made a subtle appeal to Hispanic voters when he sent out a mailer recently tying Chu to shady Chinese businessmen. But will more blatant appeals to ethnic pride follow?

The Chu campaign isn’t the only outfit that has accused the Cedillo campaign of making racially motivated appeals.  The Calitics Editorial Board did the same thing (N.B. that this was written before I joined the board), especially in the context of the Pleitez mailer, which seemed to coincidentally feature pictures of Pleitez with white and African American women.

But if the Cedillo campaign is to be defended against these accusations, the truth of the matter is that given the context of the campaign, they don’t really have a choice if they want to win.  The Cedillo campaign is wedged between a candidate of a different ethnicity with certain crossover appeal and key endorsements on one side, and on the other side by an aggressive young candidate who is eating into the base that Cedillo needs.  If Cedillo is going to win, he’s going to have to do it by being the candidate from and for the Latino community and getting those voters out to the polls, which is no easy challenge.  I make no bones about saying that the strategies that the Cedillo campaign has been employing are personally distasteful.  But I also understand that given the current climate, that’s the path to victory.

That’s the news for today.  I will be occupied for most of tomorrow and unable to post a roundup, but I will be visiting the campaigns of Cedillo, Chu and Pleitez before election day to give a report from the ground about how the three major campaigns are going.

Six days left to go, and the chattering class is paying attention.  Here’s what they’re saying.

• The Los Angeles Times is doing their take on the ethnic divide on the race, and presents something you probably never knew–that voters tend to prefer voting for candidates of their own ethnicity over those of other ethnicities!  I guess Avenue Q was right.  Especially telling is the final quote:

“Ethnicity is a factor,” said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC. “But it’s not the only factor.”

My world has been rocked beyond belief.  Sarcasm aside, though–if you’re going to do a piece on ethnicity in the CA-32 race, you could at least include some of the juicier, more intriguing aspects of the race–things like, what type of support will Emanuel Pleitez draw and how will that affect the race?  What will the impact of Betty Tom Chu be?  You know–more like our coverage.

• If national media coverage won local Congressional elections, Emanuel Pleitez would be in really good shape.  Following up on the positive coverage in the Los Angeles Times about his candidacy, National Journal has what amounts to a glowing review of Pleitez’ online strategy in today’s online version.  While I think that calling Pleitez a “web candidate” in the title does him a little bit of a disservice, the point is that Pleitez has tried something relatively new for a Congressional seat: using social media to facilitate a more lateral structure as a major part of the organization.

To me, the most interesting part of Pleitez’ run against two much better known heavyweights is the fact that if the same race had been run five years ago, someone like Pleitez would have struggled to even get off the ground, much less be talked about in the same breath as the major candidates in this race.  But the creation of easy-to-use online fundrasing through ActBlue as well as the massive proliferation of social media has allowed for the creation of an entirely different element to politics that really used to only apply at a more national scale, starting with Dean and perfected by Obama.  The most interesting thing will be to see what happens when today’s Facebook generation become political heavyweights themselves–how will the traditional and currently non-traditional elements of politics interact?  I expect that at some point in the future Pleitez’ run for Congress will become a reference point for political experts about both the benefits and the drawbacks of dependence on social media as a key element in the campaign.

• Presuming that either Gil Cedillo or Judy Chu advances to the expected runoff and then proceeds to victory in July, the game of musical chairs will continue–either for Chu’s Board of Equalization seat, or for Cedillo’s 22nd District Senate Seat.  La Opinión is reporting (Spanish-language) that if it’s the latter, Los Angeles City Councilmember Ed Reyes (District 1) is going to take a shot at the seat.  That, of course, would open up a seat on the City Council as well.  Just one more reason for Democratic politicians to really support Democratic Presidents–it opens up all sorts of opportunities for career advancement.

• I’m glad we have better commenters than the people at Mayor Sam.  This nugget is particularly entertaining:

I could dream that 3 Dems could split the enough so that the R can win but that is dreaming. If we were competitive in urban areas that scenario wouldn’t be out of the question.

Some people just don’t understand that this is a consolidated Primary election.  Just to clarify: if nobody gets 50%, the top vote-getter by party will proceed to the July runoff.

Eight days before the special election, and the campaign activity is really heating up.  Today’s roundup includes the latest endorsements, media coverage, and, of course, your absolute favorite…more attack mailers!

This will be somewhat lengthy and slightly opinionated–so come beneath the flip.

All three candidates have some positive endorsements and media coverage to report.

Over the weekend, the Cedillo campaign announced a couple of media endorsements: the Senator received the endorsement of La Opinion, one of the L.A. area’s most prominent Spanish-language newspapers.  For those that can read Spanish, here’s the key graf:

Gil Cedillo es el candidato más adecuado para representar los intereses de un distrito con el perfil demográfico y socio económico como el 32. Tiene la experiencia demostrada y prioridades centradas en la reforma de salud, inmigración y en la sociedad privada-pública para el desarrollo. ¡Vote por Cedillo!

In addition to that, the Cedillo team also reports the endorsement of Eastern Group Publications, which, according to the campaign’s release, runs 11 bilingual community newspapers in the district.

Judy Chu has claimed some prominent endorsements of her own, including the endorsement of Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez.  Given how the Cedillo campaign reacted to Chu’s endorsement by Villaraigosa, combined with the fact that Congresswoman Sanchez has had a longstanding public feud with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus over Congressman Baca, I am eagerly licking my chops in anticipation of any release that Cedillo’s team sends out to countervail the Sanchez endorsement.

Chu has also obtained the very wordy endorsement of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.  Key graf:

We’ll lean toward the more policy-wonky candidacy of Chu, currently serving as an elected member of the state’s taxation body, the Board of Equalization. A math major and former professor of psychology, Chu isn’t as flashy as some. But she has garnered the endorsements of most area city council members because she served for 13 years on the Monterey Park City Council herself, and therefore knows our cities’ interests deeply, before her election to the Assembly. She’s close to Solis. Through her equalization position, she’s become an expert at getting revenues into government coffers – in these times, nothing could be more crucial.

The endorsement is very even-handed and worth reading.  It also takes a stab at the propositions, with some interesting and unique conclusions.  Editorial boards across the state are really all over the map on these things.

Pleitez also had a good media day–he and his campaign have received positive coverage on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.  The main gist of the piece is that Pleitez is running a spirited race who will be able to attract a number of votes significant enough to alter the complexion of a multi-candidate low-turnout election–though Cedillo’s campaign manager Derek Humphrey disagrees publicly with the assessments of the other political experts mentioned by saying that the only people who care about Pleitez are the “chattering class”–i.e. media.  Only the voters will get to determine who’s right.

Interestingly, the piece also takes note of the “party animal” negative mailer story that was first broken in a big way here on Calitics.  Here’s what the Times has to say:

Nonetheless, the Cedillo campaign sent out a mailer recently that featured photos of a partying Pleitez that it said it got from his Facebook page. “Should this man represent you in the House of Representatives?” the mailer asks, “Or in Animal House?”

Most saw the mailer as evidence that Cedillo is worried.

“If they didn’t feel he was a serious candidate, they wouldn’t be attacking him,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College who co-wrote “Epic Journey,” a book on the 2008 presidential election.

My take, of course, is the same take that I posted before in the first thread about this piece.  We in the “chattering class” may not consider a candidate who draws even 5% to be a serious candidate.  But in a special election like this where every vote matters, that 5% could be serious, especially if most of the votes that Pleitez gets are in the Latino areas of unincorporated East Los Angeles and El Sereno.

But now to the part you’ve all been waiting for…attack mailers!

Our first offering comes from Judy Chu, attacking Gil Cedillo not only on using campaign money for travel, but also for being absent on such travel–specifically, being in India–while the legislature was working on the budget situation.  You can see the images from these below.  Cedillo has defended himself on the matter of the campaign contributions–I happened to interview him on the day that the original L.A. Times story broke–but I am hoping for a response from the campaign regarding the accusation about the timing of the travel as well.  I have a call into the campaign, and am expecting a response tomorrow, since I have no way of knowing whether this was a legitimate fact-finding trip that other legislators went on or what the purpose was, both of which would be useful to know before providing any further commentary.

India mailer 1

India mailer 2

India mailer 3

Cedillo’s team has dropped more negative literature of its own.  This one, again, explicitly accuses Judy Chu of “pay-to-play” regarding the Chu’s votes to grant tax refunds to corporations that gave her contributions.  The language is pretty explicit, as you can see:

Whirlwind 1

Whirlwind 2

Whirlwind 3

Whirlwind 4

Whirlwind 5

I do have a problem with this.  And it’s not that it’s negative.  I’m expecting negative mailers as a prime campaign strategy.  The problem is that this seems to be the Cedillo campaign’s main attack against Chu–it’s not the first time that the campaign has attacked along these lines.  And, as the L.A. Times has documented, it’s patently false:

The “tax breaks” cited in Cedillo’s mailings are actually refunds of tax overpayments by corporations, according to Board of Equalization records and documentation the Cedillo campaign provided to The Times.

Most, if not all, were routine, noncontroversial matters approved by unanimous vote upon recommendation of the agency’s staff, according to Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for the Board of Equalization.

Gore said it is common practice for some corporations to pay more taxes than they owe — sometimes as a hedge against inadvertently paying too little and being penalized — then seek refunds for the overpayments. All refund requests are carefully vetted by the staff, Gore said.

The Cedillo team’s attacks, after all, aren’t just questioning the integrity of one public official–they’re questioning the entire reputation of the state’s tax collecting authority.  And even the refutation of the refutation leaves a little to be desired:

Abalos also said making a distinction between “tax breaks” and “tax refunds” was not as important as Chu’s voting on the matters.

If honesty is a value, it actually is.  If I file my return and I’ve overpaid taxes, I get a refund.  That’s not a tax break.  A tax break is a special favor.  A tax refund isn’t.  In the same article, another high-level person in the Cedillo campaign called the refunds “tax relief.”  Sorry, but no, they aren’t.  “Tax relief” is a Luntzian expression for a tax cut.  An overpayment refund isn’t a tax cut.  Now, I’m willing to listen to the argument that Chu should have excused herself in order to avoid even the appearance of conflict-of-interest.  But that’s not the case the campaign was originally making.  Of course, the voters of the district are going to read the mailer far more than they’re going to read Calitics or the political section of the L.A. Times, so…I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what constitutes a good campaign strategy.

The Chu campaign has also submitted an official response, which I quote in part:

Despite the fact that Cedillo’s claim that Judy Chu has voted for tax breaks for corporate contributors have been thoroughly discredited, Cedillo devotes a panel of his latest hit mailer to recycling them.

Cedillo is however now calling the tax refunds “tax favors.”  (A tax refund is a favor?) Cedillo claims that Judy Chu should have abstained on the tax refunds (Apparently he thinks everyone should abstain on votes.)

And that’s what I’ve got for today, with the promise of more tomorrow.  If you’ve made it this far, I salute you.

Over the past couple of days, my email box has become a lightning rod for supporters of various candidates in in CA-32 special election, many of whom have been communicating alternately their approval or dismay at my post concerning the recent mailer from the Cedillo team.

I was also contacted by Gil Cedillo’s campaign manager Derek Humphrey, who provided me with this quote in defense of the mailer:

A number of people contacted our campaign about the Pleitez facebook page.  I think they were really shocked to see these pictures of him partying and drinking on what is essentially an extension of his campaign website.  These are recent photos that any internet user can easily access.    

I am sure it’s common place for a 26 year old recent college graduate to post photos to their facebook page that glamorize drinking, partying, and dancing on tables.  But, members of Congress and elected officials are role models for young men and women in their community and their behaviors reflect their character.

But you know what I really like to get in my inbox?  The ones that provide me PDF’s or images of the mailers that other campaigns are sending out–because those provide me not only more material to cover for the race, but in some cases an increasing amount of hilarity.

So without further ado, below the fold I present you…

CA-32 mail-a-palooza!  Images and mild commentary below the fold.

Now, the first thing I should mention is that many Cedillo supporters–even those who agreed that the mailer by the Senator’s campaign was excessive–have pointed out that Pleitez’ campaign was the first to go negative and sent out an attack mailer against Chu and Cedillo.  Here, then, is that mailer:

Pleitez attack mailer

Now, it does disappoint me to see Democrats go after other Democrats–and faulting Chu and Cedillo for everything that’s wrong with California’s budget is an exaggeration, to put it mildly.  First, because Cedillo has been progressive–to my knowledge, at least–on budget issues, and second, because Chu doesn’t really have much to do with that as a member of what is primarily a tax collecting agency.  Does this negative political attack on the experience and legislative activity of Chu and Cedillo justify the more personal attack that was made on Pleitez?  That is something I wait for other readers to decide.  The only thing I leave you with is, yes, Pleitez attacked first.

I’ve also received a few complaints about another mailer from Pleitez.  This one’s not a negative piece, but here it is nonetheless, or at least the first page:

Pleitez Democratic mailer

The objection here, as you might surmise, is that the mailer seems to claim an endorsement from Obama, Clinton and Villaraigosa, whereas Obama and Clinton certainly haven’t endorsed in this race, and Villaraigosa has endorsed Judy Chu–and that has rankled some members of other campaigns.  I wasn’t sent the other side or internal elements of the mailer (if there are any) to see if that effect is mitigated or enhanced by any other part of the piece.

But I like to save the best for last: the attack mailer sent out by Judy Chu’s namesake and distant affine, current Republican Monterey Park City Councilmember Betty Tom Chu.  Here is is, front and back.

front

back

Now, since this mailer comes from a Republican, I have no issues with excoriating it.  Let’s take the front.  First, the line “how to spot a loser” is hilarious on its face for its lack of professionalism.  “Loser”?  But what’s even worse is the fact that moles appear to have been photoshopped onto Judy Chu’s face–making the use of the word “spot” quite ironic.

Next up, of course, are the negative characterizations of Chu’s activities on the board of equalization.  Such as:

Wrote a law to forgive tax cheaters

This, of course, is referring to Chu’s lead role in the tax amnesty bill, which allowed for a window for forgiveness of penalties on belated tax returns.  According to the BoE website, this was a huge success that brought in billions in previously uncollected revenue.

FAIL.

Next one is just as good:

Granted refunds to corporations that gave her campaign donations

This one is notable because, to be completely honest, Cedillo used the same misleading attack.  Yes, Chu voted for routine tax refunds of overpayments.  Businesses like the one I run are required to pay estimated taxes for the year on a quarterly schedule ahead of time.  If we pay too much, we get the excess payments refunded.

It’s an easy negative attack against Chu because while the content of the statement is true, the moral implications are absolutely false.

The other side is equally entertaining–especially the…interesting…picture of Mayor Venti, as well as the line, “Judy, on the other hand, has none of these qualities.”  That reminds me of the now-infamous line from the DailyKos hatemail Saturdays: The Lord Rebuke you!  Classic.

And for that reason, Betty Tom Chu wins the award for…WORST MAILER IN THE WORLD!!!

P.S. if anyone has any other mailers by anyone, for anyone, or against anyone in the CA-32 race, please send them my way:

hekebolos at gmail dot com

In 2007, Calitics watched as Laura Richardson ran a nasty, race-baiting campaign in a special election in CA-37, emphasizing that the seat “should be held by someone from our community” and using what amounts to an identity politics wedge to carry her to victory.  We found that distasteful, and hoped that Democrats in future campaigns would not resort to such dirty politics.  When the race to replace Hilda Solis in CA-32 began, we thought the candidates, nominally progressive Democrats, would highlight their policy positions and positive attributes instead of using divisive tactics.  The major candidates, Board of Equalization member Judy Chu, State Sen. Gil Cedillo and former Obama transition official Emanuel Pleitez, all espoused generally progressive ideas throughout the campaign.  But then again, so did Richardson, and we do believe that, at some level, how you campaign does dictate how you govern.

Therefore, we have been extremely disappointed in Gil Cedillo’s divisive and often false attacks on his rivals.  He started his campaign talking about “our community” and “our people”, clearly attempting to play upon a Latino/Asian divide inside the district, which has a larger Hispanic population (which is an odd tactic for someone like Cedillo, who has never represented anyone from the 32nd district, to take).  Cedillo’s blatantly false mailers against Judy Chu during the race, attempting to blame her for the economic crisis by associating her with unrelated headlines and claiming that “Politicians like Judy Chu give tax breaks to their big corporate contributors,” when as a BoE member she merely returned tax refunds owed corporations, were bad enough.  But the mailer against Emanuel Pleitez, using Facebook images to build a false narrative of Pleitez as a drunken womanizer who hangs around with non-Hispanic women (a deliberate effort – we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this mailer only went to Hispanic women) and throws “gang signs” (actually that’s the sign for Voto Latino, an organization for which Pleitez was a past board member), goes beyond the pale.  This slandering, not only of Pleitez but of women in general, as if appearing in a picture at a bar connotes being a slut, goes well beyond what should be expected of a public official, and certainly beneath someone asking to be given a promotion and sent to Washington.

Calitics was generally comfortable with giving no official endorsement on this race until the events of the past couple weeks.  We find Dr. Chu to be a progressive leader and Pleitez to have a significant amount of knowledge and energy, and Cedillo has been a past champion on significant issues like immigration.  But the events of the past couple weeks have forced us to end our silence.  Our somewhat unusual endorsement for voters in CA-32 is to vote for ANY DEMOCRAT BUT GIL CEDILLO.  The behavior he has displayed in this campaign should be rejected, not rewarded.

I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County, in the district formerly represented by now Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.  Like me, 60 percent of the residents of Congressional District 32 are Latino.  That didn’t stop my mother and I both from voting for a Chinese-American, Judy Chu, when she ran and re-ran for Monterey Park City Council in the 80s and 90s.  Nor, by the way, did it stop then-Assemblymember and Latina Hilda Solis from endorsing her.

Today there’s a pitched battle to fill Solis’ very large shoes, with Judy Chu, currently serving on the state Board of Equalization, running against State Senator Gil Cedillo.  Cedillo’s main point of persuasion for voters seems to be that since the 32nd district is a Latino district, as a Latino he is better suited to represent it.

Unfortunately for the Cedillo campaign, however, he’s not the only candidate in the race with that qualification.  Emanuel Pleitez, a 26 year-old Mexican/Salvadoran-American who served on Obama’s Treasury Department Transition Team, though trailing in third place, is apparently close enough on Cedillo’s tails to find himself the target of a vicious piece of attack mail.  The message of the mail piece: Pleitez is a “party animal.”  The evidence: Pictures on Facebook.

It’s no longer necessary at this point to further describe how innocent these pictures actually were; Calitics and The Hill have already done a great job of it.  However, given Cedillo’s primary qualification for office, it’s worth pointing out another detail his attack piece got wrong.

In the mailer, Cedillo accuses Pleitez of “flashing gang signs — and then posting the pictures on the internet.”  It then goes on to ask rhetorically, “Doesn’t he know about the lives and neighborhoods that have been destroyed by the gangs?”

If Cedillo knew the movement behind Latino political empowerment a bit better, he may have recognized that the woman standing next to Pleitez in one of those photos is Rosario Dawson, star of ‘Rent’ and ’25th Hour’ and founder of Voto Latino.  The “gang signs” the two of them are “flashing” are a ‘V’ and an ‘L,’ as in, ‘Voto Latino.’  Voto Latino’s mission is to empower Latino communities like CD-32 by getting out the vote and promoting civic engagement.  Admirably, Pleitez served on the organization’s Board of Directors.

Perhaps failing to recognize the hand gestures for what they were was a simple oversight by an ignorant communications staffer.  But eagerly jumping to the conclusion that Pleitez was endorsing gang activity on Facebook at the expense of families in the 32nd district was a reckless and malicious ploy to attract cheap votes.

The tragedy is that Cedillo has been nothing short of heroic in California in his numerous fights in the State Legislature on behalf of undocumented immigrants.  But in an all-too-typical phenomenon among politicians, the integrity that inspired him to take on these principled fights in the State Capitol have evaporated on the campaign trail.

The good news is, desperate attacks like these tend to backfire.  Unfortunately, they tend to turn people away from important elections in the process.  Senator Cedillo should bear both of these facts in mind next time he decides to go negative on his opponents.

The League of Women Voters sponsored a forum in Baldwin Park last night for candidates in the May 19 special election to replace Hilda Solis in the Congress.  The two front-runners in the race, Gil Cedillo and Judy Chu, emphasized their strengths.

Cedillo said he has had about 80 of his bills signed into law and said he has worked with the governor to save 25,000 jobs. Chu told the audience that she was proud to have the endorsement “of everybody in the family” of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who held the congressional seat until her cabinet appointment this year.

At the forum at Baldwin Park’s Julia McNeill Senior Center, many of the candidates agreed on some issues, including the need for immigration reform that provides a path to citizenship, eliminating tax loopholes for corporations using offshore accounts to shelter income and the need to reform education, especially regarding the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Calitician and Judy Chu netroots advisor Todd Beeton has more at his Twitter feed.

With two weeks to go, the signals I’m getting suggest that Gil Cedillo is nervous.  The massive unforced error of those negative Emanuel Pleitez mailers makes me believe that Cedillo fears Pleitez is capturing a good bit of the Hispanic vote.  The earlier negative mailers on Judy Chu showed a similar lack of substance (attacking someone for returning tax refunds OWED?).  Negative mailers don’t inspire turnout, they suppress it.  And the May 19 election will already feature low turnout.  Which magnifies the importance of GOTV, and with the Democratic Party and key labor groups having endorsed Chu, I would probably be throwing the kitchen sink at everybody in the race myself if I were Cedillo.

What I’d prefer to hear about, instead of who endorsed whom and such and such negative attack, are concerns of the local area.  El Monte is crashing.  The city made 60% of its tax revenue off of the auto dealerships that lined the city, and with the demise of the auto industry throwing auto sales off the cliff, revenue has shrunk.  Many cities with clusters of dealerships will soon face the same problem.  What can be done at the federal level to diversify the local economy, and shouldn’t the efforts to revive the economy in auto manufacturing states like Michigan extend to cities with a proliferation of car lots like El Monte?  If anyone from the campaigns is reading, maybe we can get an answer to that.

(This election is 2 weeks from next Tuesday. – promoted by David Dayen)

“Community organizer.”  “Coalition builder.”

These were the words that made me the proudest when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke about me as he endorsed me last week.

It was precisely through community organizing that I got my start. I was inspired to first get active on campus when I joined the movements to stop the Vietnam War, to fight for civil rights, and to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

My activism continued beyond college when in the mid-1980s, a group of longtime residents in Monterey Park scapegoated new immigrants in the city by pushing for English-only signs in the city and English-only books in the library. When they got a resolution passed in the city council saying that only English should be spoken in the city, that was the last straw. I decided to join a multi-ethnic coalition of Latinos, Asian Americans, and whites to defeat the resolution and we were successful. Out of that movement, I ran for a seat on the Monterey Park city council, and won, spending the next 13 years working toward my goal of getting the diverse groups in the community to work together in harmony.  

It was around that same time that I first met Hilda Solis. We were both fighting to prevent the political boundaries from being redrawn in such a way that the San Gabriel Valley would be divided. While I was in an Asian American coalition, and she in a Latino coalition, we realized that we would have much more power if we fought together as a united force. So together, we went to Sacramento to testify and as a result, we were the only community group in the state that got what we wanted.  

I continued my efforts toward coalition building during my time in the state assembly. Several bills required a hard-fought consensus in order to be passed. One such bill that I carried was AB 805, the Heat Illness Prevention Act, which prevented the tragedy of heat illness for outdoor workers by requiring shade, water and rest periods. To make my point about the importance of such protections, I held a “meeting in the sun.” I held it in a field in the central valley, outside in 100+ degree heat for over 2 hours, while bringing together the Governor’s representatives, the United Farm Workers, the AFL-CIO and the press. We made our point and the protections were put into law.

It is this spirit of bringing people together to work toward a common goal, and of building coalitions between people who may have conflicting interests, that I want to take to Washington DC. Even now, as I run to replace my friend, my mentor and the greatest community organizer I know, Hilda Solis in Congress, I am building coalitions of support for my candidacy. We knew from the outset that the California Democratic Party endorsement was a crucial step toward winning this seat and we also knew that my opponent, a sitting state senator, would have the advantage of institutional connections from Sacramento, so what did we do?

Organize, organize, organize.

In a mass mobilization that the California Democratic Party had never seen before, we got 400 delegates and delegate proxies out in force the day of the endorsement meeting, providing a lunch for them prior to the vote. We turned the lunch into a grassroots rally and we had stand-by proxy voters waiting up to 3 hours in case I needed them. It was a truly “people powered” campaign. In the end, my opponent saw he’d been out maneuvered, so pulled his voters at the last minute, preferring instead to get zero votes. The result? A unanimous endorsement for me from the California Democratic Party.

During this truly unique time in our history when we have our country’s first community organizer president, it would truly be an honor to take the lessons I’ve learned building coalitions and bringing communities together to Washington D.C. I hope you’ll help me do that as we head into the final 2 weeks before election day. Please join us this weekend for precinct walking:

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Canvass & BBQ

9:00am – 1:00pm

Campaign Headquarters

4153 Maine Ave.

Baldwin Park, CA

Sunday, May 3, 2009

2:00pm – 5:00pm

Campaign Headquarters

4153 Maine Ave.

Baldwin Park, CA

You can find out more about volunteer opportunities at www.JudyChu.net and, of course, donations are always appreciated at ActBlue.