Georgy Russell's Weblog has a cute story about her late-campaign encounter with Cruz Bustamonte in the Castro district of San Francisco:
one funny story from the campaign trail involves my encounter with cruz bustamante. during the campaign finale, cruz came up with the brilliant idea of doing "polaroid photostops" around town. the idea was that cruz would cruise around, pop into shops and ask random people if they wanted to pose for a polaroid with him, because he is just so, well, dashing!
(i mean really, at least use a camera phone. polaroids are super 80's.)
Read the whole thing. It's good.
Former Nixon speechwriter turned conservative columnist William Safire said on Friday's PBS Newshour about the recall: "Big interesting thing is the Hispanic vote. The Republicans got over 42 percent of the Spanish, the Hispanic vote against a Hispanic who was running. Now that augers very well for Republicans all over."
Get a clue, Safire. Latino voters don't just say, "Gol-lee, this guy's got a Latin-sounding name, we better vote for him." Bustamonte was a corporate-centrist clone, who was known for being tight with the big growers who rely on truckloads of illegal Latino laborers but oppose every measure to protect their rights as people or as workers. Bustamonte was never particularly popular among Latino voters, and probably couldn't win a Democratic gubernatorial primary. Especially not now, after his campaign was so weak.
Bustamonte won a big Latino vote because he was the Democratic replacement alternative to Schwarzenegger. If anything, Schwarzenegger's embrace of the anti-immigrant Pete Wilson's team and his opposition to the driver's license bill reminded Latino voters about why so many of them tend to vote Democratic.
2 comments:
Dear Bruce, Your comments about Bustamonte raise two questions in my mind. First, if Bustamonte was such a weak candidate why did you vote for him? You could have voted no on recall and for someone else for replacement governor. Second, why did California Democrats pick such a weak candidate for replacement governor? Sounds like they need to do some work to get their act together for next year. David
David, reponding to your questions: (1) I didn't vote for Bustamonte; (2) California Dems *didn't* pick Bustamonte as the party candidate, nor did the Reps pick Scwarzenegger; one of the problems of the process is that it bypasses party primaries. By "next year" I assume you mean the Scwarzenegger recall. - Bruce
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