Steve Wiegand: Race to succeed Doolittle is a GOP-vs.-GOP contest

Sacramento Bee ^ | 3/6/8 | Steve Wiegand

[SmithL]

I drove up to Auburn Tuesday to see Tom McClintock rhetorically throw his hat into the ring.

"The ring" in this case refers to the 4th Congressional District, and the cliché is historically appropriate. Apparently derived from a frontier tradition of throwing one's headgear into a boxing ring to announce one's pugilistic intentions, it was popularized as a political term by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

"My hat's in the ring. The fight is on, and I'm stripped to the buff," Roosevelt said as he announced he would challenge a heretofore fellow Republican, William Howard Taft, for the presidency.

Which is what McClintock was doing Tuesday, although he kept his shirt on. The race to replace retiring-under-a-cloud incumbent John Doolittle is now pretty much between McClintock and former Rep. Doug Ose, a fellow Republican.

The Democratic candidate is Charlie Brown, a retired Air Force officer who came fairly close to upsetting Doolittle in 2006, mostly because of an FBI probe into Doolittle's links to the felonious doings of former D.C. lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

But the 4th CD, which sprawls from Roseville to the Oregon border and from Orangevale to Lake Tahoe, is Reep country, with a heavier GOP registration than all but four of California's 53 congressional districts.

History is against Brown as well: Since 1966, according to UC San Diego politics prof Gary Jacobson, just five Dems have won a congressional seat in California in districts where Reeps had a lead in voter registration, and none of those had nearly the 17-point gap that the 4th CD does.

Which brings us to another political cliché: "carpetbagger." This came into use after grubby opportunists packed their belongings in cheap valises and flocked to the post-Civil War South to loot the locals.

Constitutionally speaking, members of Congress don't have to actually be...

[C19fan]

If you read the article the author takes a swipe at McClintock and praises Ose as a “reasonable” Republican. Considering this is from the Sac Bee this is reason enough to vote for McClintock in the primary. Just confirms Ose is a RINO.

[DIRTYSECRET]

TOM MCCLINTOCK HAS TO GO SOMEWHERE. What this confirms is that California is a lost cause politically and financially. It does no good to have him shouting from the rooftop. Once he gets the nomination he will have smooth sailing to Washington where he can be a member of the minority once again. It’s unfortunate, especially now that the state is no better off than when Arnold took office.