So...what's the aftermath and what can we learn--besides, of course, that Judy Chu will defeat her distant cousin easily on July 14? Postmortem below the flip.
I was invited yesterday by Emanuel Pleitez' press secretary Emily Dulcan to come to the office to interview Emanuel Pleitez and some members of his team on the second day of GOTV weekend. By chance, campaign consultant Eric Hacopian, who has been the center of a manufactured controversy recently, happened to be in the office, so I got a chance to interview him as well.
The office was lively, with about two dozen phone bankers of all ethnicities and ages working the phones from the campaign office. According to the field directors, they currently had 55-60 volunteers canvassing neighborhoods from that office at the time. For space, the recap of the interviews is below the flip.
First of all, forgive me for not posting an update about the CA-32 race yesterday--I happened to have the honor of being a volunteer driver in Vice President Biden's motorcade during his recent stay in Los Angeles. Mr. Dayen did an admirable job of picking up the slack.
In addition, I wish to issue a correction today. In Wednesday's roundup, I made a factual mistake in implying that if Judy Chu were to win the CA-32 race, that there would be a special election to replace her. This is not true. The California Constitution specifies that in the event of a vacancy on the Board of Equalization, the Governor appoints a replacement subject to the confirmation of a majority of the Assembly and the Senate. It would be interesting to ask whom Schwarzenegger would appoint in that scenario, as well as to see if the Democratic Legislature would permit the Governor to appoint a Republican to fill a strongly Democratic Board of Equalization district. In any case, I apologize for the error.
This Gil Cedillo is really a miserable little person. Over at Nuestra Voice you can hear him with LA radio DJ Mario Solis Marich answering questions about that ridiculous attack mailer on Emanuel Pleitez using Facebook photos to build a narrative of Pleitez as a scary drunken gang-lover who parties with white women. In the transcript, you'll notice Cedillo's immediate reaction to bringing up Pleitez' name:
SOLIS MARICH: There was some controversy over the past 2 weeks when your campaign decided to do a negative attack piece on newcomer Emanuel Pleitez. Many people who observe campaigns including myself took that as a sign that the young candidate was really eating into your base.
CEDILLO: Well, one we're not sure we'd call it negative unless he calls it negative, the fact that he posted these photos on his Facebook.
Two, we recognize what his roll is in this campaign, to suppress the vote and to try to take away votes and we think the electorate has the right to know all the information, information that he's made public, about the candidates. We put the record out there and let people decide if they want to elect someone who has 25 years of effective leadership or if they want to elect somebody who they may not have full confidence in.
So in other words, anyone who participates in a campaign to try and get elected is automatically "suppressing votes," presumably votes from Gil Cedillo. The backstory here is that Parke Skelton, Judy Chu's campaign manager, and Eric Hacopian, Pleitez' top strategist, have worked together on other campaigns, which is to be expected from two Democratic consultants in LA. Off of that thin reed Cedillo spins a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that Emanuel Pleitez swooped into the race to suppress votes from the naturally chosen "one" candidate who is supposed to win the seat. Now, if you were of a conspiratorial nature, you could say the exact same thing about Betty Tom Chu, the Republican Monterey Park City Councilwoman who entered the race late and will undoubtedly cause some ballot confusion given the closeness of names between her and Judy Chu. But it's this sense of entitlement on the part of Cedillo, this idea that he deserves that Congressional seat and no Hispanic should dare "suppress the vote" by, you know, running against him, that stands out here. This is typical sleazeball identity politics, the idea that any Hispanic must vote for a Hispanic, and multiple Hispanics in the field dilute the strength of the vote, and they should line up and wait their turn behind the self-anointed savior.
Now, here's the rest of the interview, where Cedillo becomes increasingly ridiculous:
Five days left to go, and the news continues out of CA-32--mostly recaps and summaries. And most of these articles are some of the prime examples of just why journalism is suffering--perhaps I should call it "the banality of balance." In the attempt to be as even-handed as possible, the truth is often a casualty. But there are a couple of good, more detailed pieces about the election, which I'd like to highlight below.
For the sake of brevity, go beneath the flip. I promise it's worth the click. There's a lot of interesting material today.
Six days left to go, and the chattering class is paying attention. Here's what they're saying.
• The Los Angeles Times is doing their take on the ethnic divide on the race, and presents something you probably never knew--that voters tend to prefer voting for candidates of their own ethnicity over those of other ethnicities! I guess Avenue Q was right. Especially telling is the final quote:
"Ethnicity is a factor," said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC. "But it's not the only factor."
My world has been rocked beyond belief. Sarcasm aside, though--if you're going to do a piece on ethnicity in the CA-32 race, you could at least include some of the juicier, more intriguing aspects of the race--things like, what type of support will Emanuel Pleitez draw and how will that affect the race? What will the impact of Betty Tom Chu be? You know--more like our coverage.
• If national media coverage won local Congressional elections, Emanuel Pleitez would be in really good shape. Following up on the positive coverage in the Los Angeles Times about his candidacy, National Journal has what amounts to a glowing review of Pleitez' online strategy in today's online version. While I think that calling Pleitez a "web candidate" in the title does him a little bit of a disservice, the point is that Pleitez has tried something relatively new for a Congressional seat: using social media to facilitate a more lateral structure as a major part of the organization.
To me, the most interesting part of Pleitez' run against two much better known heavyweights is the fact that if the same race had been run five years ago, someone like Pleitez would have struggled to even get off the ground, much less be talked about in the same breath as the major candidates in this race. But the creation of easy-to-use online fundrasing through ActBlue as well as the massive proliferation of social media has allowed for the creation of an entirely different element to politics that really used to only apply at a more national scale, starting with Dean and perfected by Obama. The most interesting thing will be to see what happens when today's Facebook generation become political heavyweights themselves--how will the traditional and currently non-traditional elements of politics interact? I expect that at some point in the future Pleitez' run for Congress will become a reference point for political experts about both the benefits and the drawbacks of dependence on social media as a key element in the campaign.
• Presuming that either Gil Cedillo or Judy Chu advances to the expected runoff and then proceeds to victory in July, the game of musical chairs will continue--either for Chu's Board of Equalization seat, or for Cedillo's 22nd District Senate Seat. La Opinión is reporting (Spanish-language) that if it's the latter, Los Angeles City Councilmember Ed Reyes (District 1) is going to take a shot at the seat. That, of course, would open up a seat on the City Council as well. Just one more reason for Democratic politicians to really support Democratic Presidents--it opens up all sorts of opportunities for career advancement.
• I'm glad we have better commenters than the people at Mayor Sam. This nugget is particularly entertaining:
I could dream that 3 Dems could split the enough so that the R can win but that is dreaming. If we were competitive in urban areas that scenario wouldn't be out of the question.
Some people just don't understand that this is a consolidated Primary election. Just to clarify: if nobody gets 50%, the top vote-getter by party will proceed to the July runoff.
Eight days before the special election, and the campaign activity is really heating up. Today's roundup includes the latest endorsements, media coverage, and, of course, your absolute favorite...more attack mailers!
This will be somewhat lengthy and slightly opinionated--so come beneath the flip.
Over the past couple of days, my email box has become a lightning rod for supporters of various candidates in in CA-32 special election, many of whom have been communicating alternately their approval or dismay at my post concerning the recent mailer from the Cedillo team.
I was also contacted by Gil Cedillo's campaign manager Derek Humphrey, who provided me with this quote in defense of the mailer:
A number of people contacted our campaign about the Pleitez facebook page. I think they were really shocked to see these pictures of him partying and drinking on what is essentially an extension of his campaign website. These are recent photos that any internet user can easily access.
I am sure it's common place for a 26 year old recent college graduate to post photos to their facebook page that glamorize drinking, partying, and dancing on tables. But, members of Congress and elected officials are role models for young men and women in their community and their behaviors reflect their character.
But you know what I really like to get in my inbox? The ones that provide me PDF's or images of the mailers that other campaigns are sending out--because those provide me not only more material to cover for the race, but in some cases an increasing amount of hilarity.
So without further ado, below the fold I present you...
CA-32 mail-a-palooza! Images and mild commentary below the fold.
When I was with the East Bay Young Dems on Thursday night talking about my campaign and its potential to inspire more young working class folks to run for Congress in the 2010 mid-terms, one name came up a few times: Emanuel Pleitez.
The 26-year-old activist CA-32 candidate has been in the news this week as well, after coming under blistering attack from State Sen. Gil Cedillo. And what for? Because Pleitez has Facebook pictures that show him dancing, and with women. Calitics has done some great coverage on this hit mailer, which seems to be designed to destroy Pleitez in the Latino community as Cedillo faces a tough fight with Judy Chu.
I join Calitics in an unusual endorsement in this race: Any Democrat but Gil Cedillo.
Any Democrat but Gil Cedillo.
In 2007, Calitics watched as Laura Richardson ran a nasty, race-baiting campaign in a special election in CA-37, emphasizing that the seat "should be held by someone from our community" and using what amounts to an identity politics wedge to carry her to victory. We found that distasteful, and hoped that Democrats in future campaigns would not resort to such dirty politics. When the race to replace Hilda Solis in CA-32 began, we thought the candidates, nominally progressive Democrats, would highlight their policy positions and positive attributes instead of using divisive tactics. The major candidates, Board of Equalization member Judy Chu, State Sen. Gil Cedillo and former Obama transition official Emanuel Pleitez, all espoused generally progressive ideas throughout the campaign. But then again, so did Richardson, and we do believe that, at some level, how you campaign does dictate how you govern.
Therefore, we have been extremely disappointed in Gil Cedillo's divisive and often false attacks on his rivals. He started his campaign talking about "our community" and "our people", clearly attempting to play upon a Latino/Asian divide inside the district, which has a larger Hispanic population (which is an odd tactic for someone like Cedillo, who has never represented anyone from the 32nd district, to take). Cedillo's blatantly false mailers against Judy Chu during the race, attempting to blame her for the economic crisis by associating her with unrelated headlines and claiming that "Politicians like Judy Chu give tax breaks to their big corporate contributors," when as a BoE member she merely returned tax refunds owed corporations, were bad enough. But the mailer against Emanuel Pleitez, using Facebook images to build a false narrative of Pleitez as a drunken womanizer who hangs around with non-Hispanic women (a deliberate effort - we wouldn't be surprised to learn that this mailer only went to Hispanic women) and throws "gang signs" (actually that's the sign for Voto Latino, an organization for which Pleitez was a past board member), goes beyond the pale. This slandering, not only of Pleitez but of women in general, as if appearing in a picture at a bar connotes being a slut, goes well beyond what should be expected of a public official, and certainly beneath someone asking to be given a promotion and sent to Washington.
Calitics was generally comfortable with giving no official endorsement on this race until the events of the past couple weeks. We find Dr. Chu to be a progressive leader and Pleitez to have a significant amount of knowledge and energy, and Cedillo has been a past champion on significant issues like immigration. But the events of the past couple weeks have forced us to end our silence. Our somewhat unusual endorsement for voters in CA-32 is to vote for ANY DEMOCRAT BUT GIL CEDILLO. The behavior he has displayed in this campaign should be rejected, not rewarded.
I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County, in the district formerly represented by now Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. Like me, 60 percent of the residents of Congressional District 32 are Latino. That didn't stop my mother and I both from voting for a Chinese-American, Judy Chu, when she ran and re-ran for Monterey Park City Council in the 80s and 90s. Nor, by the way, did it stop then-Assemblymember and Latina Hilda Solis from endorsing her.
Today there's a pitched battle to fill Solis' very large shoes, with Judy Chu, currently serving on the state Board of Equalization, running against State Senator Gil Cedillo. Cedillo's main point of persuasion for voters seems to be that since the 32nd district is a Latino district, as a Latino he is better suited to represent it.
Unfortunately for the Cedillo campaign, however, he's not the only candidate in the race with that qualification. Emanuel Pleitez, a 26 year-old Mexican/Salvadoran-American who served on Obama's Treasury Department Transition Team, though trailing in third place, is apparently close enough on Cedillo's tails to find himself the target of a vicious piece of attack mail. The message of the mail piece: Pleitez is a "party animal." The evidence: Pictures on Facebook.
It's no longer necessary at this point to further describe how innocent these pictures actually were; Calitics and The Hill have already done a great job of it. However, given Cedillo's primary qualification for office, it's worth pointing out another detail his attack piece got wrong.
In the mailer, Cedillo accuses Pleitez of "flashing gang signs -- and then posting the pictures on the internet." It then goes on to ask rhetorically, "Doesn't he know about the lives and neighborhoods that have been destroyed by the gangs?"
If Cedillo knew the movement behind Latino political empowerment a bit better, he may have recognized that the woman standing next to Pleitez in one of those photos is Rosario Dawson, star of 'Rent' and '25th Hour' and founder of Voto Latino. The "gang signs" the two of them are "flashing" are a 'V' and an 'L,' as in, 'Voto Latino.' Voto Latino's mission is to empower Latino communities like CD-32 by getting out the vote and promoting civic engagement. Admirably, Pleitez served on the organization's Board of Directors.
Perhaps failing to recognize the hand gestures for what they were was a simple oversight by an ignorant communications staffer. But eagerly jumping to the conclusion that Pleitez was endorsing gang activity on Facebook at the expense of families in the 32nd district was a reckless and malicious ploy to attract cheap votes.
The tragedy is that Cedillo has been nothing short of heroic in California in his numerous fights in the State Legislature on behalf of undocumented immigrants. But in an all-too-typical phenomenon among politicians, the integrity that inspired him to take on these principled fights in the State Capitol have evaporated on the campaign trail.
The good news is, desperate attacks like these tend to backfire. Unfortunately, they tend to turn people away from important elections in the process. Senator Cedillo should bear both of these facts in mind next time he decides to go negative on his opponents.
Jeremy Cohen, the Communications Director for Pleitez for Congress, sends along a comment to me about the negative mailer sent by Gil Cedillo's campaign:
Emanuel is running for Congress because people here are being severely affected by the economic crisis. It's sad that the Cedillo campaign wants to surf Facebook while families are being kicked out of their home and people are losing their jobs.
We also think it's unethical that his campaign would use the photos of these women for a political smear without any form of consent. Many of them are highly educated professionals -- teachers, non-profit directors, nurses -- who would be horrified to find that their picture had been mailed to tens of thousands of voters. Cedillo is not only smearing the name of Emanuel, but defaming dozens of women who have no involvement with the campaign.
Seems to me that Gil Cedillo probably did Pleitez a favor here. As this story an the controversy around it grows, Pleitez has an opportunity to increase his name ID and deliver his message to more voters. And Cedillo comes off looking really, really bad.
See also this comment. Cedillo's people knew exactly what they're doing by using pictures of Pleitez with non-Latina women.
The League of Women Voters sponsored a forum in Baldwin Park last night for candidates in the May 19 special election to replace Hilda Solis in the Congress. The two front-runners in the race, Gil Cedillo and Judy Chu, emphasized their strengths.
Cedillo said he has had about 80 of his bills signed into law and said he has worked with the governor to save 25,000 jobs. Chu told the audience that she was proud to have the endorsement "of everybody in the family" of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who held the congressional seat until her cabinet appointment this year.
At the forum at Baldwin Park's Julia McNeill Senior Center, many of the candidates agreed on some issues, including the need for immigration reform that provides a path to citizenship, eliminating tax loopholes for corporations using offshore accounts to shelter income and the need to reform education, especially regarding the federal No Child Left Behind law.
With two weeks to go, the signals I'm getting suggest that Gil Cedillo is nervous. The massive unforced error of those negative Emanuel Pleitez mailers makes me believe that Cedillo fears Pleitez is capturing a good bit of the Hispanic vote. The earlier negative mailers on Judy Chu showed a similar lack of substance (attacking someone for returning tax refunds OWED?). Negative mailers don't inspire turnout, they suppress it. And the May 19 election will already feature low turnout. Which magnifies the importance of GOTV, and with the Democratic Party and key labor groups having endorsed Chu, I would probably be throwing the kitchen sink at everybody in the race myself if I were Cedillo.
What I'd prefer to hear about, instead of who endorsed whom and such and such negative attack, are concerns of the local area. El Monte is crashing. The city made 60% of its tax revenue off of the auto dealerships that lined the city, and with the demise of the auto industry throwing auto sales off the cliff, revenue has shrunk. Many cities with clusters of dealerships will soon face the same problem. What can be done at the federal level to diversify the local economy, and shouldn't the efforts to revive the economy in auto manufacturing states like Michigan extend to cities with a proliferation of car lots like El Monte? If anyone from the campaigns is reading, maybe we can get an answer to that.
(full disclosure: I serve as the the Political Director of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, which overwhelmingly endorsed Gil Cedillo for the CA-32 Congressional seat. In what follows, as well as anything else I write or have ever written about this race or any other issue, the opinions written here are strictly my own personal views, and do not reflect the official views of any organization I am involved with in any official capacity.)
The CA-32 race is getting personal. Gil Cedillo's campaign has already gotten some criticism for the use of unrelated headlines in a mailer against Judy Chu, and now Cedillo has gone negative against the other candidate in the race with a shot at viability: Emanuel Pleitez, the 26-year-old former employee of the Obama-Biden Treasury Department transition team.
Now before I continue with the mailer itself, which is the heart of this story, I should first point out the initial implications that I perceive about Cedillo's campaign going negative on Pleitez: by my view, it's not a good sign for the campaign. If the campaign is spending money, energy and political capital in attacking someone who was supposed to be a minor candidate and who has raised about a quarter of the money that Cedillo's campaign has, it would indicate that Cedillo's team is afraid that Pleitez is drawing a larger share than expected of the demographic that Cedillo would need to beat Judy Chu, and I don't view it as a positive sign for Cedillo's campaign that it's having to use negative mailers to shore up its other flank.
But let's get to the mailer itself, which you can see front and back at these links:
The CA-32 race to replace Labor Secretary has less than six weeks to go until the primary. We know about the two major candidates; Board of Equalization member Judy Chu (not to be confused with Betty Chu, who will appear directly above her on the ballot and surely cause some errors among voters) and State Senator Gil Cedillo, whose extreme spending of campaign contributions on shopping, meals and lavish hotels made the LA Times this weekend and caused a stir.
Somewhat less remarked-upon has been the candidacy of Emanuel Pleitez, a product of East Los Angeles and Woodrow Wilson High School, who matriculated at Stanford, joined the advisory board of Voto Latino (a group that encourages voter registration and engagement for the Latino community), worked for Democratic lawmakers like Antonio Villaraigosa, Tom Daschle and Hillary Clinton, and worked on the Obama transition team at the Treasury Department. On Friday I had the opportunity to chat with Pleitez about his life experiences, the financial crisis, housing policy and a host of other issues. A paraphrase of that conversation follows.
(As a side note, this story about one of the volunteers on the campaign, who traveled all the way from Santiago, Chile to work on it, is pretty amazing.)
Through a series of vacancies and some early action, California has suddenly become ground zero for Congressional elections. Here's the latest news on some of the races.
• CA-32: The special election for Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis' seat will coincide with the statewide special election on May 19th. The major candidates, Board of Equalization member Judy Chu, State Sen. Gil Cedillo and Obama transition official Emanuel Pleitez, actually met in a forum last week sponsored by the Southwest Voter Registration Project, and the Latino Professional Network. I didn't learn about it until a press release popped up in my inbox from Cedillo's press flack touting "Cedillo is Victorious in First Debate". Seeking a somewhat less biased opinion, I struggled to find a news report until coming across this in the Whittier Daily News.
Immigration issues dominated the agenda when three of the leading Democratic candidates to replace new Labor Secretary Hilda Solis met face to face for the first time at a forum Thursday night.
"Today I met with the president ... I could have said anything ... what I said was, 'Mr. President, please stop the raids. Please stop the raids now,' " Cedillo said of a meeting with Barack Obama during the president's town hall meeting in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Cedillo is known for repeatedly introducing legislation to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licenses, but he said that his legacy goes far beyond: "In 11 years of the legislature ... I have written 80 bills signed by three governors. I have fought to defend immigrants, because I believe it is the right thing to do."
Chu discussed being raised by an immigrant mother in South Central Los Angeles, fighting against an English- only movement in Monterey Park, and pushing legislation in Sacramento to protect outdoor migrant workers and require contracts negotiated in a certain language to be printed in that language.
"I support bills that will bring justice to immigrants. Many times immigrants do not have a voice in the political system, and it is up to us, who are in elected positions, to be able to speak up for them," she said.
Pleitez, too, was born to an immigrant mother, who crossed the border from Mexico while pregnant with him. He said his childhood growing up at the "mercy of the generosity of the people of my community" in back rooms and back garages of neighbors created a debt that he owes to the district.
"I was able to move on to Stanford University, Goldman Sachs ... but I will never forget ... this debt that I have," he said.
"I will leverage my youth to organize around the country ... to really pass immigration reform."
This was the last scheduled debate where every major candidate has committed to attend, and judging from the article, observers found little differentiation between the candidates on the issues. Cedillo vowed not to vote for any health care system that didn't include immigrants "regardless of immigration status," but given the audience I would expect that kind of rigidity. I hope there will be a wider range of issues discussed in a public way, and as I have in the past I invite all the candidates to share their views here on Calitics. We should have at least one response in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, PowerPAC, a new group targeted at youth of color which aided President Obama in California and across the nation last year, endorsed Gil Cedillo. He also received the endorsement today of former Assemblyman Ed Chavez.
• CA-10: The field is still assembling after last week's announcement that Ellen Tauscher will leave Congress to work on arms control policy in the State Department. While Sen. Mark DeSaulnier has not formally announced, such an announcement is expected. In the meantime, Adriel Hampton, a municipal investigator for the San Francisco City Attorney's office, is among the first to formally announce. Hampton clearly seeks to leverage social media and Web 2.0 (he has a Ning site, in addition to Facebook and Twitter) to create buzz for his outside-the-establishment campaign. Hopefully he'll pop up around here as well. I'm not seeing a lot of substance behind the "hey kids, let's put on a Government 2.0 show" announcement, but I'm sure that will come. Perhaps others can fill in the missing pieces here. (Actually, Robert did, below.
Meanwhile, the Yacht Party still must believe that this seat holds the same demographics as it did when it was represented by a Republican in 1996, because they continue to trot out names to contest the seat. Melanie Morgan is touting someone. Yes, Spocko's Melanie Morgan.
Conservative activist, author and former radio talk show host Melanie Morgan sent an e-mail yesterday saying she's "squealing like a schoolgirl" to announce that Catherine Moy - executive director of the Move America Forward group of which Morgan is chairwoman; co-author with Morgan of "American Mourning;" and a Fairfield City Council member - will run in the special election to succeed Rep. Ellen Tauscher, assuming Tauscher is confirmed to a high-ranking State Department post.
"The conservative counter-insurgency has begun, and I'm going to do everything in my power to get Cat elected," Morgan wrote. "Cat has terrific name recognition in the area, a devoted following and she is entirely capable of running this race and winning it - as a rock-solid conservative who has never voted to raise a single tax, and has a solid record on national defense working relentlessly with the largest pro-troops grassroots organization in the country."
I don't think Morgan knows what the word "counter-insurgency" means. Will she be seeking out groups inside the district to reconcile differences and win hearts and minds with a movement of primary resistance?
Other Republican names are floating out there, but the one that brings a smile to my face is tom Del Beccaro, Vice Chairman of the Yacht Party and recent founder of a PAC dedicated to stopping the Fairness Doctrine, which has already been stopped by a full vote in the US Senate.
• CA-48: It takes two years to run for Congress at the least, if not multiple cycles. So I appreciate Irvine City Councilwoman Beth Krom's kickoff in CA-48 to unseat John Campbell, bringing 300 people to Shady Canyon for the affair. Both Steve Young (the most recent candidate in the district) and Rep. Loretta Sanchez enthusiastically endorsed Krom's candidacy, so expect the field to clear. It's quixotic, but we need more windmill-tilters taking back red districts.
The San Gabriel Valley is a unique area. Within 5 minutes of Gil Cedillo's campaign kickoff for Congress yesterday in El Monte, I visited a 200 year-old Spanish mission, and a Pho shop in Alhambra where I was the only guy in there who didn't speak Cantonese. This is a series of highly homogeneous communities, which doesn't have the same media, doesn't have the same leadership, and doesn't even speak the same language.
However, it's a demographic reality that the district is over 60% Latino while being about 18% Asian. This is an urban, middle-class Hispanic district. And while Gil Cedillo doesn't represent it in the State Senate, he drew a lot of support to his initial campaign event yesterday. Close to 400 people packed a storefront in El Monte to get started on the campaign. Before there's even a date set for the primary election (though everyone assumes it will be folded into the May 19 special election), yesterday Cedillo supporters were out canvassing the district.
But first, there were a series of speeches and endorsements. Cedillo will have the backing of the Latino political establishment in the area. The big news yesterday was that Rep. Xavier Becerra, of the neighboring district of CA-31, was out to endorse. He joins the local county supervisor Gloria Molina, the local city councilman Ed Reyes (a small part of the district includes LA City), former Rep. Esteban Torres, and several other councilmembers and local politicos in giving their endorsement to Cedillo. Molina even intimated that Congressional Hispanic Caucus support would be coming. There was some not-all-that-subtle rhetoric about "our community" and "our people." It's clear that this is a replay of the CA-37 special election, where Laura Richardson pushed an African-American/Hispanic divide. With Cedillo's main competition being Judy Chu, there's definitely going to be some of that Hispanic/Asian divide in this race, though I imagine it will be more respectful that Richardson's toxicity.
What complicates this is that Chu received the Cal Labor Fed endorsement and actually has support from a few Latino lawmakers of her own. Cedillo was sure to tout his 100% labor scorecard in his short address. In the rest, he talked about a campaign of faith and hope, strength and leadership. He called the San Gabriel Valley "a slice of America," where families come to buy a home, raise children, and get an education. And he talked about the need to make the economy work for those families, with a particular emphasis on health care (he mentioned how great it would be to build a hospital with the stimulus money - even though I'm pretty sure that won't be something the stimulus can do). Cedillo is at his best when talking about immigration. His tireless support for the California version of the DREAM Act, to allow undocumented students to attend college and be eligible for financial aid, has earned him a sterling reputation among young people, many of whom were there volunteering yesterday.
I don't know how many of those young people are eligible to vote, however, and in particular, eligible in that district. Cedillo will have no shortage of volunteers, but he doesn't completely have a voting base inside the district, having never represented it. Outside of Molina, the endorsees are not by and large from the population centers of the district, either. The other factor in this race is Emanuel Pleitez, who liveblogged at FDL yesterday. He is a local, with a small but strong group of former Obama organizers working with him. If you look at this strictly on the level of identity politics, having Pleitez in the race probably helps Judy Chu a bit. The big question, of course, is who is going to turn out their voters.
Minutes ago, the US Senate confirmed Hilda Solis by an 80-17 vote to be the Secretary of Labor. This is a big victory for progressives to fight conservative obstructionism and get a real friend to the labor movement in a top position in Barack Obama's cabinet. It was an unnecessarily long fight, but this is a great resolution. In addition, with Solis having authored the Green Jobs Act, she will undoubtedly be a force for making sure jobs in the alternative energy sector are good union jobs that pay a living wage.
This also means that there will shortly, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, be a vacancy in the 32nd District seat. There are three main candidates for the seat thus far, all of whom have already begun campaigning.
Judy Chu is currently on the Board of Equalization. While a Chinese-American running for a seat that is majority Latino, Chu has the support of the California Federation of Labor, which typically cleans up in these kinds of special elections. That alone makes her the favorite IMO.
Gil Cedillo is a State Senator in the adjoining district, and so he represents very few of these constituents. He has been strong on issues around immigration in particular, and will certainly be formidable in this race.
Emanuel Pleitez worked in the Obama transition team on the Treasury Department. The fact that Treasury has practically no senior officers staffing it save for Tim Geithner, over a month after the inauguration, doesn't really speak well to Pleitez' transition capabilities. But he apparently has the most robust campaign apparatus in the district thus far (with 17 volunteer full-time staff members), and he was born and raised in the district.
We invite every single one of them to interact with us on Calitics.
The most likely scenario is that either the primary or the general election gets folded into the May 19 special election. Gov. Schwarzenegger has 14 calendar days to set the schedule.
Good news: Hilda Solis will get a long-awaited confirmation vote to be the Secretary of Labor tomorrow in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The hold-up was ridiculous, based on "confusion" on Solis' stand on the Employee Free Choice Act, when it was extremely clear where she stood (in full support), and even more clear that as a legislative issue she would have little to do with the legislation until it was enacted. Earlier in the day, Think Progress noted that the right wing was attempting to Daschle-ize Solis for completely bogus reasons:
In the wake of Daschle's departure, the right-wing is gunning for another Cabinet victim - Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA), the nominee for Labor Secretary. The Heritage Foundation writes, "Hilda Solis: The Next Tom Daschle?"
According to The Hill, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) "has questioned whether Solis had done lobbying work while she was both a House member and an official at a pro-labor group, American Rights at Work" (ARW) [...]
As for the "conflict of interest" that the right wing is highlighting? Solis wasn't paid for her activities with ARW, and as the Washington Independent pointed out, her role was well-known and ceremonial:
"What would be the charge? Either that she participated in lobbying by being a leader with ARW, or that she erred by originally not mentioning this job in her disclosure documents. Two reasons this might not work: Solis' role in ARW was well-known and ceremonial (it's on their Website), and no congressman has hinted that he/she would file a complaint that could make a splash but not be deemed frivolous and politically motivated."
This is typical right-wing obstructionism designed to score political points. Let's hope Solis is confirmed be a wide margin tomorrow. It's beyond ridiculous.
Related: CA-32 candidate Emanuel Pleitez, one of at least three to declare for Solis' seat, has some good thoughts about the culpability of credit rating agencies in the financial meltdown.
