Assemblyman: Russian interference should be taught in schools

Good morning. Happy Thursday. We begin this morning with an inauguration eve question: Should Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election be taught in schools?

One assemblyman thinks so.

The extent to which Russia interfered is still being investigated, but reports suggest there’s consensus among U.S. intelligence officials that Russia hacked emails of Democratic officials and operatives in an effort to influence the election. The hacked emails were distributed to the news media, including CalWatchdog, throughout the election through the site WikiLeaks. 

Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-Marin County, has introduced legislation to require state educators to develop curriculum for students to learn about Russia’s involvement in the election.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Trump Transition: “In selecting former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue for agriculture secretary, Donald Trump dealt Abel Maldonado, the former California lieutenant governor and apparent finalist for the position, one more high-profile, if unsurprising, blow,” writes Politico. 

• Bullet Train: “A lawsuit filed in 2014 by Kern County against the California High-Speed Rail Authority will be dismissed under the terms of a settlement announced Wednesday afternoon by the state agency. … This is the third of the seven CEQA lawsuits to be settled.” The Fresno Bee has more. 

• AG appointment: “(Xavier) Becerra also said he’d defend and enforce recently approved voter-enacted ballot initiatives to speed up the death penalty process and legalize recreational marijuana.” The Sacramento Bee has more. 

• State vs. Feds: “Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency cast doubt on whether California should continue to have power to impose its own emission rules for cars and trucks, an authority the state has enjoyed for decades that is also the cornerstone of its efforts to fight global warming.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

Legislature:

• In at 9 a.m.

Gov.Brown:

• No public events announced.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @sam_s_oh

Short-term pain with ACA repeal

Good morning! TGIT. Republicans in Washington appear poised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, some time after Donald Trump is sworn in as president.

With premiums on the rise and consistently poor polling, repeal is music to the ears of many, as evidenced by every federal election since the measure was passed in 2010. But California would suffer major economic consequences if Congress repeals the ACA without an adequate replacement, according to a new study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center. 

A partial repeal (as a full repeal still seems out of reach) would cause Californians to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in annual federal funding and kick millions out of coverage. Some of the losses would be offset by gains elsewhere, but it’s impossible to give a complete analysis of the offsetting effects without Republicans’ replacement plan.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Budget: “California’s state auditors recently released an unflattering look at the state’s finances, part of their annual report. Issued several years in arrears, the assessment showed nearly $2 billion in deficit spending for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, piling more borrowed money onto what Gov. Jerry Brown has called a figurative ‘wall of debt.’” CalWatchdog has more. 

• CPUC: “Gov. Jerry Brown has chosen two of his closest advisors on environmental and climate change issues to fill positions on the California Public Utilities Commission, the powerful state agency that regulates energy companies and the telecommunications industry.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

• Trump Transition: “Abel Maldonado, California’s former lieutenant governor, the Central Coast’s former assemblymember and state senator, and Santa Maria’s former mayor, was in Florida on Wednesday, reportedly interviewing with President-elect Donald Trump to discuss a possible appointment as Secretary of Agriculture.” Santa Barbara Independent has more. 

• Lobbying: The Sacramento Bee looks at how a top Democratic donor pushed a major environmental bill through the Legislature. 

Legislature:

• Gone till January. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @LGullyborn

But that looks like a premature judgment based on the events of the past year. Business interests and the California Chamber of Commerce have had consistent success in working with moderate Democrats in the state Legislature who share their wariness toward far-reaching measures that could hurt the economy or make life more costly in their home districts.

The most prominent example: For the second straight year, a bloc of Democrats are getting in the way of Gov. Jerry Brown’s desire to gain significant environmental legacies.

Last year, they opposed the governor’s call for a law mandating that vehicles on California’s roads and freeways use 50 percent less gasoline by 2030. Brown worked with Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, to enact Senate Bill 350 and establish California as a trailblazer yet again on pioneering environmental legislation.

But the California oil industry’s argument that such a law would be costly and especially painful for poor residents — buttressed by campaign donations to sympathetic lawmakers and TV attack ads — eventually led Brown and his allies to give up on the gasoline provision of the bill, unable to muster majority support in the Assembly. Criticized for being indifferent to the needs of the environment, the moderate bloc fired back. Then-Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno, said the California Air Resources Board ignored how much its rules would hit the pocketbooks of the poor.

Governor hunting for green policy legacy

Now perhaps the state’s most famous environmental measure of this century — AB32, the sweeping 2006 law requiring a long-term state shift to cleaner but costlier forms of energy — could face a 2020 sunset without an even stronger measure taking its place, as environmentalists have long hoped.

This prospect led Brown to take the extraordinary step of trying to bind future governors and Legislatures to ambitious environmental goals that extended to 2030 — 11 years after he left office. The California Air Resources Board said Brown’s executive order was legal because “AB32 explicitly states the intent to maintain and continue reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases beyond 2020.”

State Senate Minority Leader Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield, asked the Legislature’s legal staff whether this was valid. In April, she got her reply.

“We think the determination of a standard for the statewide (greenhouse gas) emissions limit is a fundamental policy decision that only the Legislature can make,” Legislative Counsel Diane Boyer-Vine wrote. 

Since then, environmentalists — and, behind the scenes, possibly Brown himself — have been lobbying to pass an extension of AB32 and seeking to revive Brown’s push to cut petroleum use as well. As the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters reported recently, they’re not making progress. At least 15 Assembly Democrats could pair with 28 Assembly Republicans to block any bills they consider too hard on poor Californians.

It appears that California is now like the other three megastates — Texas, New York and Florida — in which pro-business Democrats have significant power in their legislatures.

The state senator who changed California politics

This development suggests that former state Sen. Abel Maldonado could end up being a more consequential figure in California politics than many governors. The only reason the jungle primary exists is that the Santa Maria Republican rancher would only provide the final vote needed to enact the state budget in 2009 if the Legislature gave California voters the chance to amend the state Constitution in the June 2010 primary.

Democratic legislative leaders went along both because of their desperation to get a budget in place with temporary tax hikes — and because of their confidence they could defeat the measure in June 2010.

They failed, with voters backing the historic change to a “top two” primary by 54 percent to 46 percent.

This surprise wasn’t just prompted by Chavez having an unexpectedly ambitious sense of what his electoral possibilities were. It was also the skepticism that a Republican could win statewide office against a glamorous Democratic figure like state Attorney General Kamala Harris. Over the last 16 years, the only GOP statewide candidates to win were mega-celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2003 gubernatorial recall, Schwarzenegger in his 2006 re-election bid, and Steve Poizner in his 2006 run for insurance commissioner against widely disliked Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.

But Chavez, 63, has an ace in hand that most politicians would die to have. He’s a former colonel in the Marine Corps — a much-decorated 28-year veteran. The hope is that this part of his resume peels away Latino, independent and moderate votes from Democrats. It’s why his press releases now routinely refer to him as “Col. Chavez.”

The last well-credentialed Latino Republican candidate for statewide office was Abel Maldonado, a Santa Maria rancher-turned-politician whom Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plucked from the state Senate to serve as lieutenant governor after Democrat John Garamendi was elected to the House of Representatives. In November 2010, seven months after the governor finally managed to face down a contentious Assembly and win Maldonado’s confirmation, the moderate GOPer lost his bid for a full four-year term as lieutenant governor to Gavin Newsom.

Newsom trounced Maldonado 50 percent to 39 percent — by 1.1 million votes — in balloting that saw libertarian candidate Pamela J. Brown gather nearly 6 percent support.

Maldonado had a difficult relationship with the state GOP establishment because of his votes for budget deals and his successful push for a “top-two” primary system that reduces the power of both parties. He also doesn’t have big-money backers, which led him to abandon a 2014 bid for governor.

Chavez will need deep-pockets backers

Chavez has much better party relations and a stronger image. It’s easy to see him wooing — or at least making a plausible case to — deep-pockets backers for a campaign against Harris. Without such backers, he will be a huge underdog.

That’s not just because of Democrats’ basic advantage in statewide elections. Harris also seems a much more formidable candidate then she did in her first run for attorney general as San Francisco DA in 2010, when she beat Los Angeles County DA Steve Cooley by 80,000 votes — less than 1 percent. She became a national figure, and not just because of President Obama’s unusual comments about her attractiveness. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for one example, is a big fan. In 2014, Harris won re-election as attorney general by 1.1 million votes over little-known GOP challenger Ronald Gold.

And she is certain to draw huge funding from big-money interests, only starting with those in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Hollywood/West Los Angeles. The half African-American, half Indian-American attorney is seen as a potential future vice-presidential nominee for Democrats, at the least.

There’s also the evidence that the Legislature isn’t as wacky as it used to be since open primaries became the norm in 2012. In a U-T San Diego editorial, I looked at some theories as to why that might be:

“[There is] evidence that 2012’s elections — in which all Assembly and half the Senate seats were up for grabs — had the moderating effect that [open-primary proponent Abel] Maldonado hoped, specifically on majority Democrats. In 2013 and so far in 2014, the Legislature has not been the liberal self-caricature it often seemed over the past 15 years.

“This is backed by a study of voting patterns from 2011-2013 by USC professor Christian R. Grose. It showed significantly more moderate stands among Assembly Democrats and some signs that Senate Democrats have moderated as well.

“But are open primaries driving this development? Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, says there may be more moderate Democrats than before, but they’ll vote the union line when Senate and Assembly leaders apply pressure. Coupal also says Senate Democrats have been weakened by the scandals hanging over three members of their caucus. And he says Gov. Jerry Brown’s pragmatism and sensitivity to ‘job-killer’ bills may also inhibit lawmakers from acting on their normally liberal instincts.

“So it’s probably far too soon to decide whether Abel Maldonado will be a footnote or a key figure in state history.”

More consequential: Rift pitting Latinos vs. teachers

But for my money, there’s potentially much bigger news unfolding. That’s the possibility that the Vergara lawsuit over anti-Latino state education policies and the Tuck vs. Torlakson race for state superintendent of public education could finally make teacher unions and the Latino community the adversaries they should have been for years.

Who is best served by the state education status quo? Mostly white teachers who belong to the CTA and CFT. Who is worst served by the state education status quo? Mostly Latino students in poor communities.

If/when this dynamic comes to the fore, it would be far more potent than a change in election rules. The CTA/CFT are the Dems’ fiscal muscle. Latino voters are the Dems’ key voter base. If they get into it — and they should, they should — California will change in dramatic ways.

“It’s time to step away for a while, and spend more time with my family and stay a little closer to home helping my community, as an active private citizen,” he said, according to his prepared remarks. “I know it’s cliché to say I am not running so I can spend more time with my family. Everybody says that. But the truth is, that is a major factor in my decision today.”

The son of an immigrant fieldworker turned mayor of Santa Maria, Maldonado has long been considered the Republicans’ best chance to reach out to the state’s growing Latino population, which is projected to become the state’s largest “race or ethnic group” in March. In 2000, although just a freshman state assemblyman, Maldonado was given a prominent speaking role at the Republican National Convention.

2009 tax vote damaged Maldonado’s rising star

Maldonado’s promising career stalled later in the decade with his 2009 vote for “the largest tax increase in California history.”

“It’s not surprising that Maldonado never caught fire with the voters on this campaign because of his deplorable record of raising taxes,” said Jon Fleischman, the publisher of the conservative website FlashReport.org.

In addition to struggling with the party’s conservative base, Maldonado’s candidacy failed to gain traction with the state’s top Republican donors. His last major campaign contribution reported to the Secretary of State’s Office occurred 60 days ago. According to campaign finance reports for the first half of 2013, the former state senator had raised $314,222, of which 60 percent had been spent on campaign consultants.

In September, Maldonado’s campaign went through a major staff shakeup as he ditched his expensive Washington D.C.-based campaign consultants in favor of a more grassroots operation that included Jimmy Camp, considered “one of the most highly respected Republican organizers in California.”

Tim Donnelly only GOP candidate now — but not for long

The announcement temporarily leaves Asm. Tim Donnelly, a favorite of the state’s Tea Party activists, as the only Republican challenger to Governor Jerry Brown. Donnelly, who thanked Maldonado for his years of service to the state, said that Maldonado’s decision provides voters with a stark contrast to Brown.

“With nearly 2 million Californians still out of work and California’s economy suffering, we remain focused on our message that’s resonating with voters – a real choice at the top of the ticket this fall,” Donnelly said. “Our goal in this primary has always been to clear the field, so that we can focus on our primary opponent, Jerry Brown. With the field narrowing, we intend to continue doing just that.”

However, Donnelly isn’t expected to remain the only Republican candidate for very long. Maldonado’s departure from the race could bolster the chances of moderate Republican Neel Kashkari, a former Bush administration Treasury Department official who managed the TARP financial bailout.

“I admire @abelmaldonado’s career of public service and know he has a lot more to contribute to California in the future,” Kashkari tweeted shortly after the announcement.

Kashkari, who is expected to formally announce his campaign soon, has made the state’s growing economic inequality a central theme of his tour throughout the state.

“Kashkari is packaging Republican issues in a way that’s designed to appeal to people who wouldn’t normally vote for Republicans,” observes UT San Diego columnist Steven Greenhut, who was impressed by Kashkari’s passion in a recent interview.

Jerry Brown well-positioned against all challengers

No matter which Republican candidate makes the November run-off, he is unlikely to defeat the Democratic incumbent. According to a Field Poll in December, Brown enjoys a 58 percent approval rating. By comparison, Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger left office with an approval rating of just 22 percent.

Brown’s numbers are so strong that some have jokingly speculated that Brown could win a Republican Party primary. In the early 20th century, California gubernatorial candidates could run in both primaries.

“Ask yourself, if Jerry Brown, the powerful incumbent governor, were in a Republican primary today might he fare well against the Republican field?” posits Joel Fox, the editor of Fox & Hounds and president of the Small Business Action Committee. “The gubernatorial candidate many Republicans might think is the safest bet in the November election just may be Jerry Brown.”

Other candidates for governor include the Green Party’s Luis J. Rodriguez, who released a new campaign video Wednesday.

By Chris Reed

The California Legislature has been such a redoubt of hardcore liberal lunacy for so long that I can’t believe I’m writing this, but May may have been the most moderate month I’ve seen in Sacramento since Pete Wilson departed the governor’s office 14 years ago.

That this happened even when Democrats had their biggest margins in the Assembly and Senate in many years makes it even more striking.

On Friday, bills banning hydraulic fracturing — the radically improved energy exploration technology that has triggered a brown energy revolution — died in the Assembly. Sen. Fran Pavley, author of a bill that passed the Senate and imposed a fracking moratorium until at least Jan. 1, 2015, indicated to reporters that she would be willing to remove the moratorium as her bill establishing fracking rules advanced over the summer.

There is still a very good chance that Pavley pushes for a regulatory framework so hostile to fracking that it will delay its expanded use in California for years. However, considering that a ban on fracking is an overriding goal of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, the demise of the moratorium push so early in the session is stunning.

On Thursday, the plastic bag ban died in the Assembly after several Democratic lawmakers offered the sort of sarcastic and common-sense takes on its silliness that Republicans have long used for nanny-state measures. Other Democratic lawmakers said they cared about jobs in their districts more than the environmentalist agenda.

Earlier in May, proposed tax hikes on oil extraction, cigarettes, soda, strip clubs and plastic bags all died.

What’s behind outbreak of sanity?

Why is this happening? Several theories come to mind.

1. Jerry Brown’s interest in fracking and his and Senate President Darrell Steinberg’s opposition to more tax hikes so soon after Proposition 30 inspired unusual pragmatism in enough Democratic lawmakers to kill measures that normally would only have died with a gubernatorial veto, if then.

2. On the plastic bag ban, minority Democrats finally have figured out that west Los Angeles/Beverly Hills/San Francisco/Marin County white Democrats have a different definition of “social justice” than they do.

3. The open primary law pushed by former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado is having the moderating impact it was supposed to, at least on Democrats.

It could be a mix of all these factors. I also think there are more independent-minded Senate Democrats than at any time in years, including several elected before the open primary took effect.

The net result: This doesn’t feel at all like the Sacramento of the Karen Bass years, when no one blinked when the Assembly speaker likened foes of higher taxes to terrorists.

We still are a terribly run state headed for ruin without major changes. But that doesn’t mean a sliver of good news shouldn’t be acknowledged.

By John Seiler

The ghost haunting this past weekend’s California Republican Convention in Sacramento was the steroid-bloated, hulking apparition of ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Just eight years ago, in 2005, Arnold was the toast of the GOP. He launched a “year of reform” that led to a Reform Slate of initiatives on the November ballot to rein in public-employee union power, reform teacher tenure and reform redistricting. He was carrying the Republican Party on his shoulders and would bring them back control of the Legislature and more statewide offices.

There even was talk among Republicans of amending the Constitution to allow foreign-born citizens to become president.

Then it turned out the Reform Slate was badly organized. Arnold campaigned tepidly for it. And every initiative went down to smoking defeat.

After that, Arnold panicked and dumped his Republican-influenced policies, claiming “the people” had shown him now to go. According to Ian Halperin’s biography, “Governator,” Arnold then effectively turned over his administration to his wife, Democrat Maria Kennedy-Shriver. Maria hired Susan Kennedy (no relation), an activist left-wing Democrat, as Arnold’s chief-of-staff. Kennedy became the “little governor,” while Arnold frolicked among his Hollywood cronies. Republicans in the Legislature claimed they were frozen out of Arnold’s circle of influence.

In 2006, Arnold signed into law the jobs-killing AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Republicans should have worked for his defeat in his re-election bid that year. Instead, they overwhelmingly supported him. They figured he still was “our Arnold” when, in debate, he attacked the tax-increase proposals of Democratic nominee Phil Angelides. And after all, he still was The Terminator, Commando, Predator and Conan the Republican.

He advertised himself as a new kind of Republican, a pro-business moderate, just the kind George Skelton is suggesting the GOP needs to promote today in 2013. He was teamed with Republican New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (now an independent) as a new kind of GOP standard bearer.

Thanks to hefty GOP support, Arnold won re-election with 56 percent of the vote.

In 2007, he proposed a socialized medicine scheme for the state so radical even leftist Democrats in the state Legislature rejected it.

Crash

The economy crashed in 2008, taking the California budget with it. In 2009, Arnold snapped into action: Breaking his pledge not to raise taxes, he increased taxes a record $13 billion. Doing so, as Chuck DeVore has noted, increased state unemployment another percentage point than it otherwise would have been, to 13 percent.

Arnold a promising young, conservative Latino state senator, Abel Maldonado, to provide a crucial vote for the tax increase. Abel was rewarded an appointment to be lieutenant governor; and with an initiative, Proposition 14, which instituted an open primary Maldo thought would help him. It didn’t. He lost re-election as lieutenant governor in 2010 and for a congressional seat in 2012.

In the 2010 election, California Republicans repeated their folly, nominating another “moderate” business person, Meg Whitman, for governor. She was wiped out.

In 2011, Arnold left office in disgrace. In his last days in office, he commuted the murder sentence of the son AB 32 ally and former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez. Arnold’s wife, Maria, ditched him after it became known he impregnated the family maid. It was a new kind of “Republican family values.”

At the end of the movie, “Commando,” Arnold single-handedly invades an island occupied by thousands of the troops of a foreign thug. After Arnold shoots everybody, an American general comes in for the cleanup, and asks, “Leave anything for us?” Arnold quips, “Juszt bodiez.”

After his seven years of misrule of California and attacking his own party, that’s what’s left of the California Republican Party: Just bodies.

By John Seiler

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the hypocrite who keeps on entertaining. He jet-sets around the globe celebrating AB 32, which he signed into law and will cut greenhouse gas emissions in California 25 percent by 2020. Yet he tools around in giant, gas guzzling Mercedes and Bentleys (seen in the picture at right) and lives in a massive compound in Malibu.

He thinks his new “autobiography,” with the unimaginative title of “Total Recall” and actually written by Peter Petre, will enhance his image. But nothing can wipe away his disastrous governorship that wrecked California; nor his betrayal of his wife, Maria, in an adulterous affair with the family maid. No wonder that, after just two months, his book is way down the list on Amazon at No. 631 best-selling.

Yet here’s what he just told the Wall Street Journal in an interview:

“If we want to advance our core beliefs in infrastructure investment, smaller government, and supporting businesses, the only path forward is to include new ideas and re-open the Big Tent to independents and women and minorities. … We have always been a party of big ideas to move the country forward, and that is what we must communicate now.”

But he did the opposite! His massive, record $13 billion tax increase of 2009 not only destroyed the state’s economy, it destroyed the careers of an up-and-coming Latino Republican, Sen. Abel Maldonado.

I met with Maldonado in the mid-1990s when he came to see the Register editorial board. He was a rising star, a moderate-right Republican and small businessman with some good ideas.

In 2014, he would have been a top contender for the Republican nominee for governor.

Seduced and betrayed

Then Maldonado was seduced by Arnold into providing the crucial vote in the Senate for the tax increase. For his perfidy toward taxpayers, Maldonado was appointed lieutenant governor by Arnold. And as part of the deal for Maldonado’s sellout vote, Arnold put on the ballot Proposition 14, the Top Two election system. It was supposed to benefit “moderates” like Maldonado by insulating them from the rage of anti-tax Republicans.

It didn’t work. In 2010, Maldonado lost a bid to be re-elected lieutenant governor. Even though 2010 was a stellar year for Republicans nationally, as they swept back into control of the U.S. House of Representatives, it was a disaster for the California GOP.

Using advertising language, Arnold talks about improving the Republican “brand.” But it was he who, during seven years of attacking California, sullied the GOP brand here for decades.

In 2012, Maldonado used the Top Two system to become one of the two candidates running for  the 24th Congressional District from California. Under the old system, he likely would have lost the Republican primary to Tea Party candidate Chris Mitchum, the son of the late actor Robert Mitchum.

But under the Top Two system, Maldo grabbed one of the slots and faced off against Rep. Lois Capps, a Democrat. (Mitchum finished third.)

Maldonado still lost, 55-45 percent. So his sellout of taxpayers gained him nothing. After being wiped out, he told the San Luis Obispo Tribune, “I’m barely on first base….I was not raised to give up. Public service is in my blood, public service is in my heart, and I love my country…. I don’t think Washington was ready for me this [political] cycle.”

Tax tables turned

It’s ironic that this tax-raiser’s own tax problems did him in. The Tribune reported:

“Maldonado’s family operation in Santa Maria is involved in a $470,000 dispute with the IRS, which is being fought out in U.S. Tax Court. The family farm also is disputing an IRS claim that it underpaid taxes by more than $3.6 million between 2006 and 2008.

“Capps made hay with the dispute, alluding to it repeatedly in her political advertisements.”

If Maldonado had sided with taxpayers in 2009, in 2012 he could have made himself out to be an anti-tax hero who was being assaulted by vengeful revenuers. But he couldn’t do that because the IRS was doing to him what he did to California taxpayers at the state level.

In his interview, Arnold continued:

“We need to focus on expanding the tent instead of shrinking it. We need to find ways to include instead of exclude. The party has tried to move to the right, and now we can see that the action and the votes are more in the center. We need to be a party of what we are for rather than what we are against.”

But by destroying Maldonado’s career, Arnold “excluded” a promising young, moderate Latino from politics. Arnold not only did not “expand” the tent, he burned it down.

And when Arnold says, “We need to be a party of what we are for,” we know what that is: taxes, taxes and more taxes; and massive new regulations, like AB 32, that kill jobs and businesses.

The California GOP would best be advised to listen closely to the advice Arnold gives — and do the opposite.

By John Seiler

California Republicans are gathering this weekend for their convention in Burbank. For inspiration, they should look to what is happening in neighboring states.

Two years ago, Republicans nominated for governor Susana Martinez in New Mexico and Brian Sandoval in New Mexico. Both favored cutting government and reducing taxes. Both won.

Last week, Texas Republicans nominated Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate. He also favors cutting government and reducing taxes. He’s a favorite to beat the Democratic nominee, Paul Sadler, in November.

Contrast that with the two Republican Latinos on the California statewide ballot in 2010. Abel Maldonado, the sitting lieutenant governor, was wiped out by Democrat Gavin Newsom. And Mike Villines was defeated for insurance commissioner by an outright socialist, Dave Jones (who’s sending the California insurance industry to his locker).

Both Maldonado and Villines started out with promising careers. Then they sold out to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the record $13 billion tax increase of 2009. Maldonado’s reward from Arnold was an appointment as lieutenant governor, then the passage of the Top Two system for elections, which supposedly favored “moderates” like him. Thanks to Top Two, Maldo now is facing incumbent Democrat Lois Capps in the 25th U.S. Congressional District. He likely will lose. So all the selling out to Arnold will have meant nothing.

Of course, the pundits and Arnold keep saying “moderates” like Maldo and Villines are the key to attracting Latinos to vote Republican. Then why is the opposite tactic — running conservatives — working in neighboring states?

Cruz control

Cruz’s case is instructive. The typically clueless GOP establishment opposed him. Reported FoxNews, “Gov. Rick Perry and much of the rest of the Republican establishment lined up to endorse [primary opponent David] Dewhurst for their party’s nomination….”

According to Lubbock Online, Dewhurst, the sitting lieutenant governor, “also had a $200 million personal fortune he could dip into and did, loaning his Senate campaign at least $24.5 million.” Dewhurst outspent Cruz by three-to-one. So Dewhurst was a typical moneybags moderate the Republican establishment adores, like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, or Mitt Romney for president.

But Cruz was strongly supported by the Lone Star State’s Tea Party activists. Lubbock Online wrote, “Cruz has a fiery stage presence that made Tea Party supporters across the state swoon, and received millions from national, conservative organizations which targeted Dewhurst as too moderate.”

Cruz also was backed by my favorite, Sarah Palin. On this video of her post-election comments, Palin points out that Dewhurst spent his money on the usual losing Republican consultants. But Cruz listened to the people.

According to critics, the Tea Party is supposed to be a bunch of cracker racists who hate Latinos and blacks. But in Texas, the Tea Partiers provide the electricity that put the candidate on Cruz control.

In other words, Cruz is an anti-Maldonado and anti-Villines. Of course, if Cruz gets elected, we’ll have to wait to see what he actually does in office. But his political stances certainly are what’s needed, and what voters crave to endorse.

Even the liberal Atlantic magazine has noticed how Cruz exemplifies how Tea Party candidates are winning:

“Time and again, the Tea Party has been declared moribund, splintered, and ineffective. And time and again, it has pulled off surprising upsets. The insurgent conservative moment won a significant victory Tuesday in Texas, where attorney Ted Cruz scored a stunning 13-point win over David Dewhurst in a Republican primary for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. The margin of victory exceeded even recent polls that showed Cruz leading by around 10 points.”

Moderation

Yet in California, “moderation” still is supposed to sell. George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times columnist celebrated for his 50 years of reporting on the state, recently attacked state Republicans for not supporting moderates, but instead continuing to support such things as the “no tax” pledge. Basically, Skelton and others think Republicans in California would win more offices if they just embraced Democratic policies. The opposite is true.

If Republicans in California have any sense, they’ll cultivate young Latinos who are conservative or libertarian — favoring cuts in budgets and taxes. They’ll get candidates who can give a good speech, fire up a crowd. And they’ll run these candidates for local offices to get some experience, and to see which is best. Then run them statewide.

By the way, did you know that, although Latinos are a majority of the Democratic Party in California, in 2010 not a single Latino was nominated for a statewide office by the Donkey Party? Same thing this year, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein running for re-election. The Democratic Party still is ruled by three septuagenarian Anglos, Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Feinstein.

With the Democrats running everything in the state, they’re going to get blamed as the state crashes into the Pacific Ocean. So…get ready.

There’s opportunity there for Republicans — if they can seize it.