All politics is local, and my particular district is a battleground for the June 5th California open primary. Our Democratic candidate is Julia Brownley and the tea party corporate Republican is thug Young Gun Nominee Tony Strickland. Tony is definitely the preferred corporate candidate, and corporate donors who supported Gallegly have flocked to Tony, building his war chest up to five times the amount of any other candidate. Still, Republicans are hedging their bets with an "independent" candidate, and Gallegly's individual donors have stepped up to support that alleged independent.
Meet Linda Parks. She loves rocky road ice cream and will make everything warm and fuzzy in Congress, being a centrist, compromising sort running a campaign where she stands for pretty much nothing. We also have a couple of corporate Democrat vanity candidates, but at least they call themselves Democrats. Parks, on the other hand, wants voters to think she's a true "independent." Also? She won't say who she would caucus with if elected.
I decided to see if I could figure it out.
In her first ad (above), Parks tells voters she doesn't take corporate money and she doesn't do their bidding. Period. Sure, she doesn't. I went and had a look at Parks' donors, and to my great surprise...no, I really wasn't surprised...many of Parks' individual donors were Elton Gallegly's individual donors. Her political consultants orchestrated the Schwartzenegger defeat of Gray Davis, not to mention Pete Wilson's election over Jerry Brown. Her pollster (hired right out of the gate) lists Voter ID as one of the "sensitive" issues they poll "discreetly.
This is why I loathe the California Open Primary law passed in 2010. This was always the strategy. Put a well-known hard-right Republican in the primary against a Republican "independent" and try to knock the Democrat out of the top two. It's why Parks came running hard right at the outset and why she's playing coy with her true colors, which are red and darker red.
Mic Farris is Parks' campaign treasurer. He is also a past Chairman of the California Reform Party. If you're unfamiliar with that, it's Ross Perot's lasting conservative legacy. Perot now donates to the Tea Party Express which is nothing more than the "grassroots outreach" portion of the hard, hard right wing. Oddly, the trajectory of the "Reform Party" in 1996 is suspiciously like the "Tea Party" of 2012.
The one thing Republicans do best is cheat, and CA-26 is evidence of that. If you're in this district, give Julia Brownley a shoutout or a bit of your time phonebanking, please. The question of whether Brownley challenges Strickland will hinge on whether people vote in the primary on June 5th. So get out the vote, and get your family to vote, and vote yourself, especially if you're in this district!
