CONNECTICUT FOR LIEBERMAN OPENING A CALIFORNIA CHAPTER?

Jackie Speier is the real candidate, not the Lieberman one

Bob Brigham is an old friend, an earlier-adapter in the world of blogging and now a San Francisco based political strategist who has lived and worked politics in CA-12. Mother Jones puts Bob in context for people who don't know his terrific and inspiring work. He just sent this report:

Open congressional seats in California are few and far between as the incumbent protection drawing of political lines means a Representative has to go out of his or her way to lose a seat. It has been so long since San Francisco has had a open (or even competitive) race that the last victor is our Madame Speaker. Needless to say, the stakes are extremely high to ensure that we will have such seats filled by progressives, not Bush Dems, for the next decades.

Earlier this year, Congressman Tom Lantos resigned from California's 12th Congressional District. The district shares about a ten mile border with Nancy Pelosi, with around a quarter of the district in SW San Francisco and the rest heading south down the peninsula in San Mateo County. As you can imagine, CA-12 is as blue as they come and deserves a voice in DC that represents the progressive values of the district.

Lantos was already on my progressives' radar screens as former State Senator Jackie Speier had been putting together the pieces to run an insurgent challenge to primary Lantos and the polling showed she was so popular that she could oust the hawkish incumbent from his perch as Chair of the International Relations Committee. In San Francisco, progressives were excited, but then Lantos retired and the progressive gate-crasher became the front-runner in the race!

There really isn't a job description for a congressional representative. Sure there are the constitutional qualifications, but the reason we have elections is so that people can tell us what they will do with the seat, what they will make of the office.

One politician who excelled at making the most of office was Leo Ryan:

After the Watts Riots of 1965, Assemblyman Ryan went to the area and took a job as a substitute school teacher to investigate and document conditions in the area. In 1970, using a pseudonym, Ryan had himself arrested, detained, and strip searched to investigate conditions in the California prison system. He stayed as an inmate for ten days in the Folsom Prison, while presiding as chairman on the Assembly committee that oversaw prison reform.

Ryan then won the Congressional seat that has now opened up and kept on making what he could of the office:

During his time in Congress, Ryan went to Newfoundland with James Jeffords to investigate the inhumane killing of seals, and he was famous for vocal criticism of the lack of Congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), authoring the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have required extensive CIA notification of Congress about planned covert operations. Congressman Ryan once told Richard Cheney that leaking a state secret was an appropriate way for a member of Congress to block an "ill conceived operation."

It was this hands on approach to making the most of the office that drew Congressman Ryan to Guyana to investigate the treatment of his constituents who had moved to Jonestown. On a nearby airfield, Congressman Ryan was gunned down and when help arrived the next day they found the mass suicide and in the jungle, Ryan's aide. She had survived twenty-two hours with five gun shot wounds. Her name: Jackie Speier.

Survivor Guyana vs. Survivor on TV

On Sunday, Jackie Speier kicked off her campaign for the seat with a HUGE crowd. Sweet Melissa noted the crowd was, "like cousin-Jackie-is-going-to-D.C. excited. The sense that Jackie is "our girl" whose time has come was really palpable." Among the 40 elected officials on hand were Anna Eschoo and Mike Thompson and John Burton. The next morning, Speier did a conference call with California bloggers (many she had known for years) and then went and picked up the endorsement of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. Later that afternoon, the only other elected even thinking about running announced he was taking the pass.

Progressives were celebrating, only a few months ago we thought we would be facing a grueling campaign against an incumbent with $1.5 million in the bank to elect Speier, but now it looked like she was going to win by default. Yet progressives aren't the only ones that realize the rare value of an open seat.

This morning's San Francisco Examiner says that we may have a race after all. Given the demographics of the district, of course the potential candidate didn't come out and say that Jackie was too progressive. In fact, there was no mention of any stance on any issue.

Instead, the candidacy was pitched like a traditional job application where the role of the job is defined. The only newsworthy items were that the potential candidate was old enough, lived in the district, is a registered Democrat and has money after winning a million dollars. Oh, and he worked for Joe Lieberman.

You really have to be a complete fool to claim to be a Democrat and then package in your campaign trial balloon a prepared statement of praise from Joe Lieberman. Anyone you has been paying any attention knows that is the kiss of death in Democratic politics, especially in a blue seat in a major blue geographic area effectively serviced by mass transit (a half an hour from both Oakland and San Jose). I'm just surprised we haven't seen any quotes from Dan Gerstein.

I don't have a problem with people who worked for Lieberman running for office, but there needs to be an apology right off the bat so voters recognize that the candidate has learned the errors of their ways and is willing to take responsibility all those who have suffered due to their support for Bush's main man in the senate.

But that isn't the route Yul Kwon (CA for Leiberman) is taking. Nope, he seems to think Lieberman praising him makes him look good (like Bush, or like Brownie during his confirmation). And that is all we know about his stealth stances on the issues. Really, this guy is best known for being a reality TV contestant on Survivor. As Will Burnett pointed out:

I imagine a Speier campaign against Lantos would have put her as the fresh face against yesterday's Democratic party. I imagine a Speier campaign against Kwon could be won with dismissiveness: "Oh yah? He survived a TV show? Oh, that's pretty cool, yah. Yah, you know what I survived?"

For a long time the DLC strategy was bland candidates who could get big money to support their right wing agenda. But this almost makes me think that the lesson they have drawn from the last few years isn't that they were wrong on the issues, but that they now need flashy candidates. This TV-15-minutes-of-fame positioning is far different than Speier's approach, she's the type who goes online to go in-depth when taking on the special interests.

Not only is Speier a progressive, but she can hit the ground running in DC. She has Hill experience (granted, it was back when Biden didn't have hair, but what goes on in the cloakroom hasn't changed that much). In her courageous career in the California legislature she had more than 300 bills signed. And she wins on the tough issues (including being an expert on one that will be front and center next January:

It took more than three years - and the threat of a citizen initiative - but Gov. Gray Davis today will put his signature on legislation to create the nation's strongest financial privacy protections.

Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, said the passage of Senate Bill 1 in the face of a powerful industry's fierce resistance was testament to the emergence of "a revolution" in privacy rights.

Americans' right to privacy - or "the right to be left alone," as Justice Louis Brandeis so eloquently defined it in a 1928 ruling - is under unprecedented assault in this society. The war on terrorism has prompted government to seize vast new powers to monitor our purchases, search our homes, tap our phones, follow our movements. The Internet, while offering wondrous access to information around the globe, also can leave a computer user vulnerable to being tracked in clandestine ways. Perhaps most ominously for the future of privacy rights, our most personal matters - the way we spend our money, the state of our health, our hopes and our fears - are commodities that can be compiled in databases and bought and sold for profit.
[...]
It's a sad sign of the times that control of an individual's personal information is considered a revolutionary concept. But the signing of California's Senate Bill 1 leaves no doubt that the revolution has arrived.

Not only is Speier great on the left-right axis, she's also great on the top-down axis. When she was termed out, she held an "exit interview" in town hall meetings across the district. The Chronicle noted at the time:

If it wasn't for term limits, "I would have run again,'' she said Wednesday. "You have to be (in the Legislature) a period of time before you're willing to slay dragons.''

For the 56-year-old Hillsborough Democrat, dragon slaying was the fun part of her job. She relished what she saw as the good fight, whether it was taking on the powerful prison guards union over their contracts or butting heads with the banking and financial services industry for years before passing a landmark 2003 privacy rights bill that banned companies from sharing their customers' financial information without permission.
[...]
"Leadership is about taking unpopular positions from time to time,'' she said. "At some point, you've got to lead.''

Jackie Speier will be the type of Congresswoman who will be slaying dragons from Day 1, fighting the good fight and leading the polls, not following them. This is a race to follow-- and to invest in.

-by Bob Brigham

And a little music clip about Lieberman for your listening pleasure: