The Riverside/San Bernardino County area, aka Inland Empire (whose Empire, I always want to know)recently beat Detroit for the dubious honor of being No. 1 in unemployment nationwide.  The Democratic challenger for the 65th Assembly District, Carl Wood, is running on job creation and tax fairness (ie, make corporations pay their fair share).  The incumbent Republican has no record whatsoever on jobs, and recently gave struggling homeowners the back of his hand on foreclosure relief.

The only hope for turning this District around is voter turnout.  A bit of local press on Wood’s odds in the extended diary.  Carl’s Act Blue page is here.

Crossposted at dKos

From Tuesday’s San Bernardino Sun:

Wood’s performance in 2008 was by far the best showing by a Democrat in the district this decade. Before 2008, Cook and Republican candidates before him had won lopsided victories – margins of victory of about 24 percentage points on average – in the 65th District, which stretches from Big Bear Lake to Hemet and from Yucaipa to Twentynine Palms.

But in 2008, Cook’s margin of victory was just 6.6 percentage points. Repeating that showing will be difficult though, as Wood was almost certainly helped by the groundswell of Democratic voter turnout that propelled President Barack Obama to victory and boosted many other otherwise-longshot Democratic candidates.

Wood knows turnout will be key this year if he hopes to build on last year’s near-success.

“That’s what makes this race so unpredictable,” he said. “It’s so heavily dependent on voter turnout. If there’s good turnout, I think I stand a good chance of winning.”

Wood had the Obama surge in 2008, but no campaign structure to speak of.  This time he has a strong volunteer base, union boots on the ground, and better name recognition.  Bill Hedrick’s excellent campaign* for the CA 44th CD is another plus for Carl, their districts overlap, and they share progressive values.   If we can pull this off, Sacramento will get a true bold progressive, one who can actually utter the word taxes without an apology, and leave his audience convinced that they’ve been had by the GOP.

*Corrected from previous version, wherein I invert the candidates and call it GOP Rep. Ken Calvert’s excellent campaign.  Ken Calvert (h/t to Howie Klein)is the incumbent we need to remove.

(8.15.10 Disclosure: My union, CSEA, endorsed Wood, and I volunteer on his campaign.)

Carl Wood is the Democratic candidate for the CA 65th Assembly District, the most depressed area in the nation after Detroit.  Carl is a lifelong labor guy with deep roots in the community.  As Public Utilities Commissioner, Carl Wood helped guide the state through the disastrous energy crisis, protecting the interests of workers and working class utility consumers.  

Wood is unapologetically liberal and direct, in a very pleasant way.  Here he is at the California Democratic Convention last April 2010:

Crossposted at dKos

Even if California passes Prop 25, the Majority Budget Initiative, Californians will still need a 2/3 majority to address the structural revenue deficit in the state budget.  We’ll need 2/3 to counter the Yacht Party, and we need more progressive Democrats to lend our own team a bit more moxie.

Carl Wood is not afraid to regulate. He’s not even afraid to say “regulate,” and sadly, that is saying something these days.  Too many Democrats are still self-censored captives of right wing frames.  Carl has already completed a public career, and he’s not afraid to be a one termer, if that’s the price for voting based on policy rather than politics.

Wood wrote a forward to the book Democracy and Regulation: How the Public can Govern Essential Services, by Greg Palast, Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor (Pluto Press: 2003).  One choice bit, among many:

Arguments against democratic oversight of any aspect of the economy, exalting commercial secrecy over regulatory openness, supposed private efficiency and vigor over governmental bureaucracy and torpor, ultimately boil down to the justification used by Mussolini’s defenders: “He made the trains run on time.” But, as this book so persuasively demonstrates, it is democratic processes that make the utilities run better, cheaper, more efficiently and more reliably.

We need Democrats who can persuade voters to fight for their own interests, especially in the CA 65th, where the unemployment rate is second only to that of Detroit.  Who will boldly assert we need more jobs, more state revenue, and less genuflecting to the free market?  Carl Wood.