It's utterly amazing at times how brain-dead the East Coast political media, both partisan and independent, can be about California's politics.
The canards about California abound and become both more entrenched with every election, such as the so-called "Bradley effect."
Some liberal Eastern pundits love to believe that Tom Bradley, then the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, was the victim of a secret anti-black bias when he lost the governorship to Republican George Deukmejian in 1982 because pre-election polls favored Bradley.
Bradley lost because he believed he had it won and stopped campaigning about a week before the election, and although he was ahead in Election Day voting, the GOP mounted a strong, mail ballot drive.
But the dumbness about California politics is certainly not confined to those on the left side of the political ledger, as Human Events, a conservative magazine, proved this month with an article bemoaning the loss of Republican congressional seats in California and blaming Kevin McCarthy, a Bakersfield congressman and third-ranking GOP leader.
The tale as told by John Gizzi in Human Events is that McCarthy embraced a California congressional redistricting plan adopted by a new independent commission even though liberal groups had influenced its mapmaking, and failed to support a referendum that, Gizzi claims, would have blocked use of the plan for 2012.
He's dead-wrong on two counts.
The commission plan was much fairer to Republicans than any a Democrat-controlled Legislature and a Democratic governor would have drawn. Instead of losing four seats in California, the GOP would have dropped by a half-dozen or more.
Furthermore, had Republicans spent millions of dollars on a referendum challenging the plan, it almost certainly would not have blocked its use in the 2012 elections.
Republicans did spend millions on a referendum on the state Senate maps. But the Supreme Court ruled that the commission's Senate maps be used in 2012 anyway.
Republicans lost some congressional seats by close margins, which reflects high voter turnout and heavy spending by Democrats.
Some apparently want to make McCarthy a scapegoat, but it doesn't square with the facts.
THE SACRAMENTO BEE
E-Mail
Print
