Lessons From Across The Pond
Last Thursday, Great Britain had its big parliamentary election, and the results astonished every single observer: a Tory (Conservative) landslide that no one saw coming. But there are important lessons for America in the UK election, as many of the politics, and the issues, are the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Lesson one: […]
California’s Latino Voter Turnout: What Happened?
Has the “Sleeping Giant” gone back to sleep, and will the Giant wake up for in time for 2016? Since passage of the controversial anti-illegal immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994, Latino voter turnout in California has mushroomed and with it Latino political clout. That is, until 2014 when turnout took a dive and many Latinos […]
The Most Important Month
April 2015 marks 150 years since the most important month in American history, April 1865. This anniversary probably won’t be remembered, although it should be. In the span of a single week that April, two events occurred that have marked American history ever since: the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham […]
A Review: “Chessman” — Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and California’s Crime of the Century
(Editor’s Note: A reading of Joe Rodota’s play Chessman, a work in progress, was performed at the B Street Theatre in Sacramento this weekend.) Crime never ceases to intrigue, especially its punishment. Half a century ago California executed convicted felons on a regular basis at San Quentin’s gas chamber. That placed capital punishment at the […]
Jerry Brown – Is The Fourth Time The Charm?
National Republicans have had a dreadful two months, culminating in their humiliating surrender to President Obama on funding the Department of Homeland Security. But now it is the turn of national Democrats to squirm, and that is over the strange affair of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Democrats are hoping for a smooth 2016 transition from President […]
Supreme Court Opens The Door To A Democratic Gerrymander
Has the United States Supreme Court just given California Democrats the right to gerrymander California’s congressional districts to their hearts’ delight? That’s the most likely conclusion from the oral arguments in a case involving the Arizona independent redistricting commission. If the Court rules for the Arizona legislature, as the oral arguments strongly imply, the Court […]
The Impossibility of a Republican US Senator
Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris is becoming more and more the inevitable successor to Sen. Barbara Boxer, but one thing will assure Harris’s election, and that is if a Republican ends up in the top two runoff against her. It is impossible for any Republican to be elected United States Senator from California. That is […]
Remembering Don Clausen
Former Congressman Don Clausen of Santa Rosa died last week at the age of 91. Not many people would remember it, but his entering politics, and his leaving it, tells us much about what has transpired in California and American politics over the past half century. Don Clausen ran for Congress as a Republican in […]
An Open Senate Race and New Rules
The 2016 US Senate race will be the first serious statewide contest under the new rules of the open primary-top two runoff. If politicians have not figured out how much it has changed California politics, they will soon. In a one-party state like California, the dominant pols generally don’t like elections, and the retirement of […]
A Racial Battle for the US Senate
The fight over who succeeds Sen. Barbara Boxer will not be partisan; it will be racial. For a quarter century, California’s two US Senate seats have been held by white Jewish women. Now the race to succeed her is shaping up to feature the Democratic establishment’s candidate, an African American South Asian woman; a candidate […]