CA: Lockyer stumbles from the starting gate

OC Register ^ | 3/17/05 | Op/Ed

[NormsRevenge]

There he goes again. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, lunching Tuesday with reporters in Washington, D.C., and effectively - although not officially - announcing his candidacy for governor, exercised his penchant for scorched- earth rhetoric. The publicity for his explosive words blunted the official candidacy announced the same day by fellow Democrat, Treasurer Phil Angelides.

Mr. Lockyer was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, about Gov. Schwarzenegger's governance style: "I don't like to dwell on this." [Sure he doesn't.] "But it has a little bit of the sort of the odor of Austrian politics. There's a sort of arrogance of power that bothers me ... . [This comes from] a long history from the Austria-Hungarian empire on, of sort of a more autocracy ... it's a more elite system."

Actually, the Austro-Hungarian empire hasn't existed since 1918. So the Austrian reference was more likely to remind people of another famous Austrian, Adolf Hitler, and that the governor's father was a Nazi Party member, as the governor himself has pointed out and decried.

--snip--

As the governor has himself explained at a number of venues, including last year's Republican National Convention in New York City, he left socialist Austria to seek his fortune in free America.

But candidate Lockyer, as we said, has a penchant for such cheap shots. In a memorable 1995 talk before the Orange County Forum when he was Senate president, he said, "I don't understand the new sort of greed, [the] I'm-gonna-take- care-of-myself-and-to-hell-with-everybody-else-in-the-world attitude that I increasingly hear from people that you [Orange County] send to Sacramento, and people I bump into in this county. It is shortsighted, self-destructive and let me tell you, eventually those people [poor people from other areas] are going to come down and burn down your gated communities."

[LtKerst]

There's a sort of arrogance of power that bothers me ...


Comming from Lockyer???? this is Laughable!!!

Lockyer is the most Arrogant Jerk in the capital.

[ClintonBeGone]

It is shortsighted, self-destructive and let me tell you, eventually those people [poor people from other areas] are going to come down and burn down your gated communities."

He almost got it right. Instead they burned down their own homes, just to prove darwin right.