Chuck DeVore v Barbara Boxer

[Schadenfreude]

This guy has an appealing way about him - very Reaganesque.

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie4Q9scCD8o[/youtube]

[SVPete]

An adult chosen at random from the phone book of a small Central Valley town would probably be vastly better than Babs Bouncer ... and probably be able to balance a checkbook too (think, House Bank Scandal).

[Celtic Rose]

I have high hopes for Chuck DeVore.  He would be a vast improvement over Boxer (though, like SVPete said, that isn't difficult).  I know that he is going to need a lot of support, because out of the three Republican Candidates, he is still the underdog.  He is more conservative, from what I can tell, than Carly Fiorina or Tom Campbell, which is going to make it even more difficult for him to win voters from Barbara, unless they end up just being sick of the Democrats by November. 

I'm excited about him.   

[NHSparky]

I almost wish Tom McClintock would consider it, but the RINO's in the CA GOP would run away from him in a heartbeat, the dumbasses.

[SVPete]

Rep. McClintock pulled off something very difficult a year ago. He held a seat where the R incumbent got caught up in a corruption scandal, and did it in the teeth of the Obama tidal wave. I'd vote for him for Senator in a heartbeat - I voted for him for Governor in the 2003 recall of Davis the Gray - but I'd like to see him consolidate his position in his Congressional district.

Tom Campbell is decent moderate R (as opposed to a mo-o-o-o-oderate turncoat idiot like Arnold). I could bite my tongue, vote for him if he were the choice next November and not have to go to the hospital emergency room for a bitten tongue.

Carly Fiorina is a bit of a cipher to me. I just tried to find her campaign website to find her platform, and just got this anti-Fiorina site that bills itself for search engines as her campaign site (assuming her site hasn't been hacked). Such tricks disincline me toward the tricksters. I'll keep looking; I expect to learn that she's either a moderate or a mo-o-o-o-oderate.

Chuck DeVore ... I haven't checked into him much yet. The word is that he's more conservative than the other prospective candidates. CA R politics are weird. With a couple of notable exceptions, "moderate" Rs tend to win the R nomination and then run a campaign so weak as to be unworthy of the word "campaign". And in a political wisdom that utterly eludes me, they tend, under pressure from the D nutjob-candidate, to devote considerable time and energy distancing themselves from the social conservatives (e.g., pro-life and/or opposed to gay marriage) in the R base. OTOH, if a conservative - social as well as fiscal - get the R nomination, the moderates and mo-o-o-o-oderates in party leadership pick up their toys and go home. That's been the story of the R Party in CA for the past 20 or 30 years. MA just showed that a deep-blue image isn't always as substantial as the image; the same is to some degree true of CA, which has, twice, voted for a traditional definition of marriage (once as a statue, struck down by the CA Supreme Court and then last year as a constitutional amendment, again, in the teeth of the Obama tidal wave).

[SVPete]

As a footnote to my comments about Fiorina, she and Meg Whitman (who is running for Governor) are billing themselves as fiscal conservatives. That sounds nice, but Arnold made identical nice-sounding noises in 2003. Arnold distinguished himself a year or two ago by campaigning to recall an R legislator ... for daring to vote against tax increases. So fiscal conservative noises without a fiscal conservative track record in government don't impress me, and arouse my skepticism.

[SVPete]

I finally found the webpage for Fiorina's stances. It is really sketchy and very incomplete wrt issues covered! Among the MIA issues are abortion, gay marriage and the full range of national security and sovereignty issues. That she's been hinting at and thinking about challenging Barbara Bouncer has been noised about in CA for 9 months or more. In all that time (and in private personal thinking for God knows how many months earlier) she couldn't craft one of those 3 or 4 paragraph statements on abortion? On gay marriage? On Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and the WoT? About illegal immigration? About education? About ...?! Unless she and her people get on the stick, and fast, Barbara Bouncer will make her silence on such a vast array of issues the issue of the campaign and eat Fiorina alive!

Reading into Fiorina's comment about energy slightly, she has drunk the AGW koolaid, and either is ignoring/rejecting/ignorant of recent revelations of fraud and shenanigans in the AGW advocacy community or simply hasn't updated her Issues webpage (probably both, IMO).

BTW, Fiorina's record as CEO at HP and a senior exec at Lucent is mixed, at least in terms of the companies' results. Lucent has the inverse Midas touch, turning gold into excrement; HP's spinning of its instruments and other non-computer business into Agilent and Avago (and other?) is starting to look OK for all concerned; HP's purchase of Compaq may still be a mistake - lousy timing, lots of $$, Compaq's reputation with customers was baggage not a boon. Many HP employees (current and former) in Silicon Valley were//are very POed at Fiorina, and they, obviously, talk to friends. San Jose is CA's 3rd largest city, and cities like Santa Clara, Campbell, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Fremont and Milpitas, while not household names outside of the SF Bay Area, are not tiny. If Fiorina gets the R nomination, look for her business record to be made an issue by Barbara Bouncer and to become a time/energy/$$ pit for Fiorina.