You might as well call it “The Lying Lounge,” but I just spent a little bit of time there. It’s quite surreal, all this attention paid to people who are saying the most obvious statements imaginable (“My candidate did well!”). But I sought out some of our California legislators, and tried to ask them about some of the issues outside of the debate that we talk about a lot.
• Rep. Hilda Solis: It was great to see Rep. Solis here! I wasn’t aware that she was a Clinton supporter (previously she had supported Bill Richardson), and I had to look up at her sign (every “spinner” has a sign) to recognize that after she started talking to me. She said that Hillary had a good chance to explain her proposals in a lot of detail tonight, including on health care and “green jobs.” I mention that she was barely given a chance to mention green jobs, and asked her what she thought about the fact that every CNN debate has been sponsored by the coal industry. “I think that’s not right,” she said. She went on to mention some environmental justice legislation she’s co-sponsored with Sen. Clinton, and I asked her to come to Calitics and tell us about it.
• Speaker Fabian Nuñez: I didn’t want to hijack the interview, but I really wanted to hear his views in the aftermath of the health care reform failure in the State Senate. Fortunately, someone beat me to it, and wound the conversation around to that. After saying that Sen. Clinton “understands the complexities of the health care crisis,” he was asked about the lessons of what took place in Sacramento this week. “That was a question of our fiscal crisis. The State Senate felt we couldn’t afford it, and I respect their perspective. But at the federal level, there’s a way to do it in a much more flexible way and get it paid for. For all the reasons we couldn’t accomplish it at the state level, you can at the federal level.” I wasn’t able to add the question of what concrete proposals we could get through this year. But I respect that answer, maybe because it’s what I’ve been saying for a long, long time.
• Rep. Xavier Becerra: The Hollywood Democrat is an Obama supporter, and he talked about how to get his message out to Latino voters. He talked about how his life is an embodiment of the immigrant experience and how he has worked with those communities. I asked him about the DTS voter issue, and how to get them educated that they have to opt in to get a Democratic primary ballot, and he basically said “Yeah, we have to do that.” Wasn’t much of an answer there. I think this is an under-the-radar issue in this primary.
• Secretary of State Debra Bowen: On E minus-5, she seemed calm. Bowen, in her role as elections cop, is maintaining a position of neutrality in the primary. “It’ll be harder in the general election,” she said. I asked her, in the aftermath of John Edwards dropping out of the race, should California look into Instant Runoff Voting so that people who voted early aren’t disenfranchised by having their candidate drop out. She said that’s something that the parties should look into (“The Green Party would probably do it immediately”), and that it would take a good deal of voter education, too. There are studies about voters in San Francisco who didn’t understand IRV and ended up having their vote eventually not count because they only filled out one choice.
Well, I made the best of it and tried to get the least lies possible.
