On Thursday, Brian Dennert of the Ventura County Star blog Brian Dennert Here had an an excellent and informative interview with current LACDP Chair and CDP Vice-Chair Candidate Eric Bauman.
Dennert talked with Eric about Proposition 8, partisanship, the budget crisis and much more. Here's a taste:
Q: The state budget is in obvious trouble with problems obviously this year and in coming years. Many point to the contracts with state workers including pension obligations.
Within that context do you remember the last time you disagreed with the tactics, budgetary priorities, or views of any of the large state unions both public employees and private sector unions?
A: California's budget situation is a disgrace. This governor was elected on a pledge to "cut up the credit cards" and sweep the special interests out of the Capitol.
In the end he has done neither. Under his watch we have a far larger deficit than we did under Governor Davis and the divisiveness between the parties is at an all time high.
This governor cannot deliver a single Republican vote for his budget plan and it is so bad the members of the Republican caucus wore name tags to a meeting with him because he has so little
contact with them.
While Democrats have put compromise after compromise on the table, and even the governor has acknowledged the need for new revenues, not one Republican is willing to compromise.
This governor has failed and his Republican colleagues have sold him down the river,
As to the old saw that this is the fault of the public employee unions, you and I both know that is nonsense. This fiscal crisis began when Arnold unilaterally reduced the state's revenue by four billion dollars by cutting the vehicle license fees.
It has worsened as out economy has tanked and our outmoded tax system has been unable to maintain any balance. My goodness, more than 52% of our state's revenues come from personal and business taxes, the most volatile possible source.
Yes, our state employees are reasonably compensated and they work hard for their money. And yes they are willing to talk about reasonable compromises to help out in this crisis. But those who are our highest earners and our largest businesses should pay their fair share and we should close every ridiculous tax loophole that we have extended to the wealthy, like the yacht tax loophole.
Finally, there are only four ways to close this budget deficit - cutting spending, raising revenue, borrowing and reforming the system, for real. Democrats are willing to do all of the above. Republicans need to get with it...
For a good read, head over to Brian Dennert Here for the rest of the interview.
This is my opinion only, and I have written this in my personal capacity. My endorsement does not necessarily mean it is the endorsement of Calitics or the Editorial Board.
If I were to draw up a list of qualities I want in a chair, I think it would begin and end with the words "grassroots leader." Specifically, I would want somebody who has spent time in the trenches, building a Democratic club, and working to get Democrats elected. Not just from the 20,000 foot level, but from right there on the ground. Knocking on doors and generally doing the things that actually get people elected.
If you asked me a few months ago about the chair's race, the name John Burton would not really be the first name that leapt to mind. Yet, here we are, and John Burton is the best person for the job. He has built Democratic clubs, in fact he helped build a club of whose board I now serve, the San Francisco Young Democrats. He went door to door, not only for votes, but also for any spare change to help Democrats in San Francisco. He understands the hard work that is grassroots politics.And all the while, he understands the other end of politics. He's been there at nearly every level of politics, making the tough decisions. And in terms of politics and policy, you don't get much more progressive than John Burton.
But more than any background, the thing that has impressed me most during my conversations with John has been his ability to seek out the best answers. You think a Congressional candidate has a decent shot at a seat, well, let's run a poll and see if it is worth pursuing. You think we can be doing a better job at our online research, well, let's work together to make it better. It is an attitude of responsiveness an inclusiveness that would be helpful at the CDP.
There is no doubt that John Burton knows how to defend seats. He did that quite well in the past. But, it is becoming painfully clear over the past months that our majority is worthless until it becomes a working majority. In other words, we need to get to 2/3. We need to strike out into areas we thought unnwinable in the past. And come the implementation of Prop 11, who knows what opportunities and challenges we might be facing.
I have faith that John will work to carry out his platform and implement strategies to what he calls turning red areas purple. And, he'll have help on that front. Eric Bauman has been an outstanding advocate of challenging red seats, registering voters and working to give our candidates, and our ideals, a fair hearing across the state. As LA County Chair, he did a whole bunch of work in the red areas in and around LA County. While I am admittedly disappointed to not be endorsing myself, I believe Eric will do a great job as Vice-Chair.
I think these two gentlemen have much to work on. They should work on bringing in greater representation among the young activist crowd that was so motivated by the Obama campaign. They should work to put young Democrats in positions where they can help bring in new blood to the party. But both of them have shown an outsized ability to mentor young Democrats, and I think they will continue to do so.
There is a lot of work to be done to make the party not only more effective in the goal of electing more Democrats, but also making the party itself more relevant to Californians. But I think they have the tools to really help the CDP. I, for one, will be thrilled to work with these two men in the coming months and years.
As one final note, I have not yet taken a position on the female Vice Chair race yet. I don't believe that one has quite shaken out yet, so I'll have to get back to you on that.
There's an interesting dynamic happening in California. At the national level, the state's power is growing. Californians hold the Speaker of the House and four key committee chairs, including the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and now the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have Californians at the helm. Any energy and environmental policies will have to go through the committees of Californians, and they'll have California allies inside the Administration, with the selection of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Dr. Steven Chu as Energy Secretary and Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Other Californians are up for possible Administration jobs, like CA-31's Xavier Becerra (US Trade Representative) and CA-36's Jane Harman (CIA Director). It's a good time to be a California politician in Washington.
It's a TERRIBLE time to be a California politician in California, as it dawns on everyone in Sacramento that the state is ungovernable and hurtling toward total chaos. The two parties are miles apart from a budget deal, and even their biggest and boldest efforts would only fill about half the budget gap. The peculiar mechanisms of state government, with its 2/3 rule for budget and tax provisions, and its artificial deadlines for bills to get through the legislature, which causes remarkable bottlenecks and "gut and amend" legislation changed wholesale in a matter of hours, and the failed experiment with direct democracy which has created unsustainable demands and mandates, make the state impossible to reform and even get working semi-coherently. The state's citizens hate their government and hate virtually everyone in it with almost equal fervor, yet find themselves helpless to actually change anything about it, and believe it or not, ACTUALLY THINK THEY'RE DOING A GOOD JOB setting policy through the initiative process, which is simply ignorant (though they paradoxically think that other voters aren't doing a good job on initiatives). The activist base does amazing grassroots work, very little of it in this state. We have a political trade deficit where money and volunteerism leaves the state and nothing returns. And the political media for a state of 38 million consists of a handful of reporters in Sacramento and a couple dudes with blogs.
Many of these problems have accumulated over a number of years and cannot be laid at the feet of anybody in particular. But in general, the reason that we've gotten to this crisis point, the reason that California is a failed state, is because by and large the dominant political parties WANT IT THAT WAY. I'm not saying that the state Democratic Party or its elected officials, for example, wants the state to be flung into the sea, metaphorically speaking, but there's certainly a tendency toward the closed loops of insiders that prefer a predictable and stable status quo, that naturally restricts reform and leads to corruption, gridlock and crisis. I'll give you an example. Last night I was on a conference call where Eric Bauman, Chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, announced that he would drop out of the race for state party Chair and run for Vice-Chair, because when 78 year-old former State Senator John Burton entered the race, all his labor, organizational and elected support dried up. Fitting that he didn't mention his grassroots support, because it clearly doesn't matter who they prefer.
There is little doubt in my mind that John Burton will run the party, or rather delegate it to whatever lieutenant will run the party, in the exact same way it has been run for the last decade or so, characterized by missed opportunities to expand majorities, a lost recall election for Governor, cave-in after cave-in on key budget priorities and a failure to capitalize on the progressive wave of the last two electoral cycles. These are not abstractions, and they have real-world effects, $41.8 billion of them at last count. And honestly, the Special Assistant to Gray Davis didn't represent all that much change, either.
We have an ossified party structure, and a phlegmatic legislative leadership that is unable to get its objectives met because the deck is essentially stacked against them. The times call for a completely new vision, one that can energize a grassroots base and use citizen action to leverage the necessary unraveling of this dysfunctional government to make it work again. The work on Prop. 8 since the election has been tremendous, but ultimately, if public schools are closing and unemployment is above 10% and the uninsured are rising and the pain felt in local communities is acute, then we have a much larger problem, one that requires a bigger movement allied with the civil rights movement to make change.
The key flashpoint is the 2010 Governor's race. There is currently no one in the field with the ability to break the lock that the status quo has on California and deliver a new majority empowered to bring the state back from the brink. In an article published last month, Randy Shaw put it best.
None of the current field appears likely to galvanize a grassroots base, or to be willing to take on the "third rails" of California politics: massive prison spending, Prop 13 funding restrictions, or the need for major new education funding. Dianne Feinstein? She'll be 77 years old on Election Day 2010, and she has long resisted, rather than supported, progressive change.
Jerry Brown just finished campaigning to defeat Proposition 5, which would have saved billions of unnecessary spending on the state's prison industrial complex. This follows Brown's television ads for the 2004 election, which helped narrowly defeat a reform of the draconian and extremely expensive "three strikes" law. Brown's consistent coddling up to the prison guards union is the smoking gun showing that he is not a candidate for change.
Gavin Newsom came out against Prop 5 on the eve of the election, undermining his own "break from the past" image. He also spent another local election cycle opposing the very constituencies who an Obama-style grassroots campaign would need to attract.
With her Senate Intel. Committee post, it is unlikely that Feinstein will run. He forgets John Garamendi, who supported Prop. 2 (!) because of his fealty to farming interests and who first ran for governor in 1982.
Shaw mentions that the state is ready for a Latina governor, and mentions the Sanchez sisters. He's right in part, but has the wrong individual in mind. I am more convinced than ever that the only person with the strength, talent, grassroots appeal and forward-thinking progressive mindset to fundamentally change the electorate and work toward reform is Congresswoman Hilda Solis. She authored the green jobs bill that Barack Obama is using as a national model. She is a national leader on the issue of environmental justice and has the connections to working Californians that can inspire a new set of voters. She beat an 18-year Democratic incumbent, Matthew Martinez, by 38 points to win her first Congressional primary. She has worked tirelessly for progressive candidates across the state and the country. In a state whose demographics are rapidly changing, she could be a powerful symbol of progress that could grab a mandate to finally overhaul this rot at the heart of California's politial system once and for all. This is not about one woman as a magic bullet that can change the system; this is about a woman at the heart of a movement. A movement for justice and equality and dignity and respect. A movement for boldness and progressive principles and inclusiveness and openness. A movement that can spark across the state.
I know that Solis is interested in the Vice Chair of the Democratic caucus if Becerra takes the job in the Obama Administration. Congresswoman, your state needs you desperately. Please consider running for Governor and leaving a legacy of progress in California.
I was only able to attend the Saturday session of this weekend's e-board meeting, under the strange and foreboding Anaheim skies - the fire in Chino Hills nearby blotted out the sun during the midday, you could actually stare right into it - but there were some interesting happenings:
• The Progressive Caucus meeting featured a debate between two candidates for party controller, Eric Bradley (the incumbent) and progressive challenger Hillary Crosby. It was good of both of them to come to the caucus and express their views, but Bradley's contentions (some would call them alibis) for why the party didn't do quite as well in downballot races this year were kind of preposterous. First, he claimed that money moved into some races late because nobody knew Barack Obama would do as well as he did. This is insulting on a variety of levels. First of all, Obama was leading by as much as 28 points in some polls as far back as June, and was never seriously threatened in any polling. Second of all, I don't see how it matters, in terms of who you spend money on, how a race that is out of your control is faring. The next thing that Bradley said, echoing something I hear a lot at these CDP meetings, is that we cannot disclose information to the membership of the party on financing because "we cannot let the Republicans know what we're doing." We might as well let them know, considering that hiding the information hasn't brought us much good. Also, the entirety of the information that Crosby and progressives like her are seeking is a) already readily available in FPPC and FEC reports and b) sought AFTER THE FACT so we can make intelligent decisions about what worked and what didn't. There is a bias toward secrecy there that is quite disconcerting.
• In the general session, there was a continued set of numbers given to prove that the CDP did everything it could to win downballot races. Art Torres mentioned 1 million live GOTV calls and $12.5 million spent. These are all nice numbers (although Obama's California campaign made 1 million calls a day in the week leading up to the election), but if the results are essentially nothing, recapturing seats that were gerrymandered to benefit Democrats to begin with, then the question of effectiveness must be asked. We had a very good session about that with a group of committed activists who ran phonebank operations and local headquarters and state campaigns, and the information was very illuminating. First of all, we have got to end the practice of being one of the only two states in the country not using the DNC Voter File and VAN software. The data is supposedly better in the current set we use, but that can be bought out and integrated into the VAN. I heard about numerous problems with the statewide Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool that made it essentially useless.
Second, there needs to be more empowerment at the local level. The stories I heard from the organizers at DP-SFV (the Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley) on how they funded their headquarters and made the best use of volunteer time, for example, was great. In the last week, however, the folks running the campaigns from Sacramento got very top-down in their approach and made all kinds of mistakes that the locals had to fix. It discouraged volunteers and organizers at the local level.
Finally, there has to be off-cycle organizing so that prospective volunteers are brought up with a culture of impacting their own communities instead of driving off to Nevada every four years. This includes finding and capturing the local groups who worked so tirelessly for Obama this year. They need to have it explained and drilled into them why staying local and effecting change inside California is so important. And organizers need to be paid year-round to help bring that about. Finally, they need to be in EVERY county, not just the populous ones or the most contested ones, to impact those statewide races for 2010. For his part, Chairman Torres said he is committed to finding organizers and capitalizing on all the energy we see now, and I think we need to hold him to that.
• The above steps make a good criteria for the next party chair, and that race was the buzz of the session. Right now we have three candidates: Eric Bauman, chair of the LA County Democratic Party; Alex Rooker, current first Vice-Chair; and the legendary John Burton, former State Senate leader and Congressman. At first I figured that Burton would have locked up so many endorsements from legislators who he's known forever that this might not be much of a race; however, Rooker won the endorsement of the CDP Labor Caucus, which is very significant (if not totally surprising, as Rooker has longstanding ties to labor). I don't know if you're aware of who pays for campaigns in California, but the labor community could have a lot to say about who's the next state party chair. In addition, a tough three-way fight with two candidates from the North and one from the South could give the Southern California candidate an advantage. (CORRECTION: Rooker is from LA County, which would give the advantage to the northern candidate)
I'm inviting all of the candidates to visit us at Calitics and offer their vision of where they want to take the party.
Eric Bauman is going to raise $1 million dollars for 2008. The best part is how he's going to spend it.
Last night, members of the Los Angeles County Central Committee raised their hands to take an oath of office from Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, and took to electing Party officers. Among them was Chairman Eric Bauman, unanimously re-elected to a fifth term.
I'm told that's a record. From his words last night, it's easy to see why.
Bauman has been singled out here as someone who speaks his mind and knows the mechanics of electioneering, even when his opinions and techniques run against the grain of some Democratic leaders.
He showed what he's made of in thanking the Central Committee and looking ahead to 2008 - and perhaps beyond:
Now is the time to rebuild, refresh and reassemble the mosaic that comprises our Democratic Party for it is only through unity, strength and shared purpose that we can be successful this fall.
As we work to build unity however, we must take seriously our responsibility to remind those we have elected or put in positions of power of their obligation to do the right thing by our Party and our people.
Whether it is protecting those most at-risk from harsh budget cuts or standing up for our Constitution or avoiding situations and actions that have the appearance of impropriety, as leaders of our Party, we must not fear holding feet to the fire and speaking truth to power.
If we truly are leaders, we must act like it: respectfully, responsibly, but fearlessly.
Who else senses a little tough love in there?
What I find interesting about Bauman's leadership of the LACDP is not just his (sadly uncommon) willingness to speak truth to power, but how he marshalls forces and resources on the ground to help candidates up and down the ballot, even in those districts often written off as unwinnable.
After the jump I'll share what I heard last night (and from Bauman separately), and what I've seen him do to build and strengthen the Democratic Party in Los Angeles County.
Anyone who knows Eric Bauman, chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, knows that he has no compunction about giving fiery speeches and telling anyone exactly what's on his mind.
And--in something the current CDP leadership should take note of--that includes Senator Dianne Feinstein. Below the fold you'll find Chairman Bauman's full letter to Senator Feinstein regarding the upcoming FISA legislation to be considered in the Senate.
I fully expect that Eric's name will be on the tongues of many grassroots CDP delegates this winter, as he is one of the early declared candidates for the CDP chairmanship.
