On Local Government

The political black hole

With his loss in the California Attorney General’s race, Steve Cooley has joined a large number of Los Angeles County District Attorneys who have found that moving up in the political world is a mere pipe dream.

In fact, the last Los Angeles DA to gain higher office was John Van de Kamp, who was elected California Attorney General in 1982. Since then, Robert Philobosian, Ira Reiner, Gil Garcetti and now Steve Cooley have all failed to make the move from downtown LA to upstate Sacramento.

However, for Cooley, the disappointment must be the most frustrating. He had, after all, won election and reelection by substantial margins as a Republican in a very Democratic county. So, he must have thought he had the advantage over San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris since she would have to make up the votes that a Democrat would normally expect to get from LA.

he calculus didn’t work, however, because of a very basic difference between those elections. In the DA elections, the candidates run without party designation. Therefore, the voters didn’t add that element into their decision. But, the state race is based on party and people who may not have known that Cooley was a Republican now did.

Of all the Republican statewide candidates, Cooley (4,350,897) performed the best, far outpolling the top of the ticket, Meg Whitman for Governor (4,109,612) and Abel Maldonado for Lt. Governor (3,804,310). Their poor performances were probably the final straw.

Nevertheless, for the political analyst, the impact of party listing has to be most interesting development in this race. In LA County, Cooley lost to Harris by 53.4 percent to 39.2 percent. This happened in a county where he was overwhelmingly reelected just two years ago for a third term.

Considering what was going on in the rest of the country, the surprise is that, other than Cooley, Republicans statewide barely reached 40 percent,with only Carly Fiorina (42 percent) and Meg Whitman (41 percent) surpassing that number.

Could it have possibly had a better overall political landscape to deal with? Or, has the California Republican brand been irrevocably tarnished by their policies, their candidates and/or their leadership?

While most people believe that California is a very “blue” state, in fact, it has had very few Democratic Governors in its history. In the 1900s, there were only four, including two named Brown. Yet, this year, we have a Democratic sweep.

Perhaps it is time for Republicans to find candidates who aren’t out to buy an office. Having some “real people” at the top of the ticket would be a start. Whitman’s spending of $145 million of her own money must have played a part in her defeat. (Her ham-handedness in dealing with the issue of her children’s nanny certainly helped, as well.)

With the dream of a competitive third party unlikely to ever happen, a viable, attractive, centrist opposition party is the only way to bring the independent center back into the political mix in California. ER