Four Republicans Who Want to Challenge Boxer

Sacramento Bee ^ | 12/18/2003 | Daniel Weintraub

[TheAngryClam]

No.

Casey is an also-ran, who, depsite trying very hard to build momentum since announcing her intention of seeking the seat in early 2002, has generated little in the way of endorsements or funding.

Rosario Marin is an utterly affirmative action candidate. Ask yourself, would someone whose major experience in politics is as a disability activist and mayor of a city of only 85,000 people generate anything like the support Rosario has if her name were "Rose Martin?"

Kaloogian is the best of a sorry lot, although Jones is probably who I'm going to end up voting for.

[PeoplesRep_of_LA]

"It was Mr. Stone and Toni Casey who held Bill Clinton's first reception in Silicon Valley back in 1990, when Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas and headed the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization Mr. Clinton used to move the party toward the political center. They also helped Mr. Clinton line up the crucial support of high-tech executives in his 1992 presidential run. "

Sounds like Toni Casey has Fair Opinion's vote wrapped up. Wonder how long it will take for the whining about how the recall leader "can't win in CA" mantra starts on every thread.

Vote Kooligan.

[Impeach98]

Well - will see. In mid-February I think we'll have a better sense of who you will end up voting for. If Kaloogian has momentum my guess is you'll be backing him and hoping he surges to a decisive primary victory.

If Jones has established himself as a dominant frontrunner my guess is it will be the reverse - you'll hold your nose and vote for him because of the argument that having a nominee come out with strength is important.

Fair assessment?

[jagrmeister]

Fair- good luck injecting reason into a California Republican primary discussion. Partisans are always the most irresponsible when discussing electoral politics and always mangle the reasoning involved in the potential of winning as a result of their ideological bias. This is why non-partisans like Charlie Cook and Larry Sabato have to handicap races. California conservatives are afflicted with the "Howard Dean supporter" syndrome where they think that because THEY buy their candidate's politics, that the candidate is most likely to win (as everyone else will come to see the logic of their candidate's positions).

[TheAngryClam]

Pretty much.

Kaloogian is far more politically palatable to me, but I have a hard time taking him seriously as a candidate. Since he left the assembly, he's done two things of major note- recallgraydavis.com and jumping on the bandwagon attacking that awful Reagan movie (which I watched, for about five minutes before turning it off in disgust).

Neither of these impress me- recallgraydavis.com turned in a tiny fraction of the total signatures in the recall effort, and was mostly a black hole for donations. And like I said, the Reagans thing was a bandwagon more than anything else.

And yet, Tom McClintock endorsed him, which, by that alone, is enough to make me want to vote for Howard.

Jones makes me sick. If he's not raising taxes, he's busy hosing a pro-RKBA initiative, finding a Republican candidate MORE LIBERAL than President Bush, and generally screwing conservatives over. However, he's the only other candidate besides Howard I could vote for.

Rosario Marin is an affirmative action candidate, and I'm having none of that, while Toni Casey was a big backer of Clinton and shows no signs at all of having changed.

Maybe I'll just vote for Danny Ball- if it's going to be someone who sucks (Jones) vs. someone I can't take seriously (Kaloogian), why not someone who both sucks and I can't take seriously (Ball)?

http://www.danneyball.com/ "Think outside the Boxer" Heh.

[FairOpinion]

Another example of how so-called conservatives actually ended up electing leftist Democrats is a Texas election.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1043302/posts

See my post 10, and post 11, the reply confirming my assessment, that conservatives pride themselves in cutting off their nose to spite their face, except that we suffer in the process for their lack of ability to learn.

[TheAngryClam]

You would prefer a leftist Republican. You've made that point clear.

[SuziQ]

And with a Republican suddenly in the governor's office and President Bush looking stronger on the national scene, the potential Boxer challengers are beginning to think they might just catch a wave and knock her off.

Heh, not to mention the fact that her seeing President Bush so popular is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. She can't help herself; she starts ranting like a harridan!! I just hope the folks in CA start paying attention to her!

[B Knotts]

I agree. I think he sounds like a great candidate. I'm just pointing out how increasingly here, we have to listen to people arguing against conservatism, on a website that is supposedly conservative.

[I_Love_My_Husband]

Candidate PING!

[I_Love_My_Husband]

Now now. I don't think the lot is sorry! Wouldn't it be great if Kaloogian or Jones got in? Come on, this is great, and it could happen! :)

The only person I think is rather unqualified for the Repubs is Rosario. And that was only after I checked her background (which is not very conservative imho).

But Kaloogian and Jones? Great!

We gotta support our people clam. I think we can win :)

[Impeach98]

"So we are back to a conservative winning 12-18% of the total votes -- TOPS. "

I don't understand your statement. You are just making things up now.

Neither Simon nor Herschensohn got 12-18% of the vote. They were both in the 40%-tile range. Just like all the liberal or moderate GOP statewide candidates who lost in the last decade.

If you are going to try to be a provocateur at Free Republic and argue against conservatism, please, try and make factual points at least. It makes it more worthwhile engaging in the discussion of ideas.

[Impeach98]

Tiny fraction? You gotta go back and do more fact-checking!

RecallGrayDavis.com collected more signatures than Mr. Costa and his People's Advocate/Davis Recall organization.

Kaloogian's Recall Gray Davis Committee collected approximately 400,000 of the total recall signatures collected.

There was a reason all of the recall rallies were organized by Howard - he had the largest recall organization of the bunch. While Mr. Issa collected the most, everything he did was paid. Paid circulators, paid direct mail. God Bless Him, but the actual 'recall organization' with people was Howard's. It was an incredible time - I worked on it, and we had a network up and down the state. Howard was never paid ONE PENNY. All the donations went to paying for the campaign operation, the legal bills to fight Secretary of State Shelley, etc... so that the signatures would be counted when they were turned in as guaranteed by our state constitution and Elections Code.

[Impeach98]

Whoops - maybe you thought I was trying to 'convince' you - NO... LOL! I was jumping on your point. The front page speaks of the nature of the conservative discussion here, but for the past 2 years, Free Republic has too often been a strategic discussion of how people WITHOUT conservative principles should receive the backing of members here.

I don't care about political parties except for the fact that people of like minds coalesce around similar ideas and therefore the parties serve a purpose.

But without principles/ideas that I agree with, to me parties are meaningless.

If the GOP forgets its principles then I have no use for it. That's why I believe in candidates like Howard, Tom, etc...

[Impeach98]

You're a bit off about DefendReagan.

The background - since I worked for Howard on Recall Gray Davis and stuck around during Defend Reagan and am now on board for Senate.

As the recall was winding down, Howard wanted to take RecallGrayDavis.com and turn it into a version of MoveOn.org which vaulted into a national Democrat-protecting organization.

Kaloogian was in the process of putting together an organization called Move America Forward. But then the Reagan thing came up. One of the talk show hosts Howard worked with urged him to use his network to help fight CBS. Howard looked around for a day into the situation. Originally he was going to be "Boycott CBS" - but the URL was not available... but at this time there was nothing up on that website. So, he went forward and realized the biggest weakness was that no one was going after the sponsors enough - the real weak point. He told us to go collect contact info for senior execs for the sponsors - we did - and we got responses from the top of every company we targeted. Only GM would stand by advertising on "The Reagans"... every other company peeled off or claimed they never were going to advertise at all.

While there were 20 'stop CBS' organizations, most weren't really going after sponsors... they were mostly collecting online petitions. This is great, but Howard's argument was let the signing of the petition be a draw to DefendReagan.org, but what will really make an impact is a Sr. Vice President getting ten thousand emails in the morning. That these people who made decisions that they thought people should just accept and swallow without complaint would actually speak up for once. Those organizations that were going after sponsors were using generic form message boxes on their websites.... where there was no bite.

The point to all of this is that in each of these instances, Howard was leading a fight for conservative beliefs he held. He thinks that a lot of our party leaders are behind the 8-ball on how to galvanize activism and excitement in the "base."

Back to that "Move America Forward" plan... well just as the Defend Reagan organization was cooling down, Howard again tried to get this organization going. BUT... one of the largest conservative advocacy groups in the country approached him and asked if they could do a merger with Howard's group where his was the surviving organization and he would be the leader. Howard was in discussions about that when Strickland struck his deal and dropped out with no time for anyone else to come in.

The reason for that long and lengthy post? There's a reason that Senator McClintock (who watched Kaloogian each day in the legislature) endorsed him. There's a reason those recall rallies were huge successes (including the July one where he brought Simon, Issa and McClintock all together - if they didn't take Howard seriously they wouldn't have shown up). There's a reason that Kaloogian was approached about building one of the largest conservative organizations in the nation - because those that know him take him very seriously.

I hope you get to know him better. But I respect the fact that as of now he leaves you unimpressed.

[TheAngryClam]

All good points, which do paint a better picture of Howard than I had originally.

Thanks

[Impeach98]

The Jones for Senate campaign has certainly chosen to package Mr. Jones in an odd light!!!

www.JonesForSenate.org

:)

[counterpunch]

After the recall it's one down, two to go!

[counterpunch]

I would like to see David Drier take on Boxer. He got a lot of good exposure supporting Arnold during the recall, and he's very personable.

I'm not so sure Republicans should be running Bush administration people in California. While I think Bush has a decent shot at California in '04, we are very independent, rebelliously so, and Washington meddling never goes down well.