Of The 10 Most Endangered Incumbents, Only One Merits Reelection

This morning Shira Center, Abby Livingston and Emily Cahn, writing for Roll Call, released a list of the 10 most vulnerable members of 2014. 5 of their vulnerable incumbents are facing bitter primaries and 5 have tight general election races to contend with. "Every name on this list," they write "has a 50 percent chance-- or more-- of not returning to Congress next year. To compose this regular feature, Roll Call’s Politics Team examines every aspect of a member’s re-election prospects: district composition, campaign operation, fundraising, quality of opponent and recent performance." They're far from an unimpeachable fount of wisdom but the list isn't bad. First some changes that they're offering to the list since last November:

Two reactionary Blue Dog Democrats who were headed for certain defeat, Jim Matheson (UT) and Mike McIntyre (NC), and Republican extremist Gary Miller of California's Inland Empire are preemptively retiring before the voters could fire them. They also took three more incumbents are off their list, declaring them relatively safe Dan Benishek (R-MI), who has a pitiful Blue Dog DCCC recruit who could never win in a million years, Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) and John Tierney (D-MA). Also deemed safer than they were are three Republicans with uber-lame DCCC mystery meat opponents who aren't going anywhere Rodney Davis (R-IL), who will face a Republican-lite Ann Callis, Chris Gibson (R-NY), who will face wealthy lightweight Sean Eldridge, and undertaker Steve Southerland (R-FL), who faces the Blue Dog daughter of Bob Graham. They also predict that Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) and Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), both from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, will be safe. That's in great part due to lame NRCC recruiting in both districts. Now their list of the 10 most endangered (alphabetical; bolded Members face primaries they could lose):

• Ron Barber (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI)
• Mike Coffman (R-CO)
• Scott DesJarlais (R-TN)
• Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm (R-NY)
• Mike Honda (D-CA)
• Ralph Hall (R-TX)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)
• Charlie Rangel (D-NY)

Only one of the 10 deserves reelection, Mike Honda. He's up against Wall Street shill Ro Khanna, who was just endorsed by the corporatists who run the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently the editors think the only people in CA-17 who matter are the Silicon Valley tech barons who have been buying up the Bay Area. The Chronicle editors have always had a knack for bowing and scraping to whomever was buying up the Bay Area at any given time. How dare Honda, a tribune of working families, not scrape and bow before the mighty the way Ro Khanna does? As Scott Lay pointed out in his Around The Capitol column Monday, Carla Marinucci, the poor excuse for a journalist who has been acting as a press shill for Khanna since the race began, led the Chronicle editors down the garden path. "Has Honda," asks Marinucci, who would no doubt get a job in the unlikely event that Khanna wins the seat, "reached out to those high-tech titans (Eric Schmidt of Google, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo among them) to find out why they were supporting Ro Khanna? Didn't Honda want and need to know where he was coming up short, or at least how he could be a more effective advocate for Silicon Valley concerns?"

Well, of those companies, only Yahoo (Sunnyvale) is located in CA-17. Google HQ is in Mountain View, Facebook HQ is in Menlo Park, Marissa Mayer and Mark Zuckerberg live in Palo Alto, Sheryl Sandberg lives in Menlo Park, and Eric Schmidt lives in Atherton. All are in CA-18, which is Anna Eshoo's district. Apple is located in the district (Cupertino), although CEO Tim Cook also lives in Palo Alto. There's a reason CA-18's median family income is 17% higher than CA-17's. Of course, CA-17 is still #3 in the state behind CA-18 and CA-33 (Coastal LA).

The tension between the many working class residents of CA-17 and the companies headquartered there is perfectly reflected in the race between Honda and Khanna.

Blue America has endorsed Honda and we're trying to help him keep pace with the plutocratic Republican money flooding into Khanna's campaign coffers. You can help here. Together we can beat all those sell-entitled tech barons. They're no less dangerous to American democracy than the Big Oil barons like the Koch brothers.