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While much of the attention in next Tuesday’s California primary has been focused on the Republican governor’s race — an absurdly expensive contest in which billionaire Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO, has opened a seemingly insurmountable double-digit lead against state insurance commissioner and ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Poizner — an intriguing, if underreported, contest is also taking place in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary where political gadfly Mickey Kaus is challenging Barbara Boxer, the party’s three-term incumbent.
The darkest of dark-horse candidates, the 58-year-old Kaus — a witty and controversial blogger whose widely-read Kausfiles are prominently featured on the popular Slate.com website, owned by the Washington Post — hopes to take advantage of Boxer’s sagging approval ratings while simultaneously riding the wave of widespread anti-incumbent sentiment to register a relatively strong showing on June 8.
Nobody expects him to win.
That includes the self-effacing candidate, who isn’t particularly optimistic that he‘ll even be able to post a relatively modest showing against the entrenched Boxer.
“I’m the only politician who won’t get picked up in the anti-incumbent tide,” he lamented a few weeks ago to Jonah Goldberg of the National Review.
Boxer, who hasn’t faced a primary challenger since 1998 when she garnered more than 92 percent of the vote against token opposition, barely acknowledges Kaus’s presence in the race.
That doesn’t discourage Kaus, who undauntedly carries on against impossibly long odds, challenging his party’s orthodoxy every step of the way. In much the same way that his 1992 award-winning book, The End of Equality, tried to persuade Democrats to rethink the concept of liberalism, the former senior editor of the New Republic is again challenging his party to reconsider its long-held positions on two key issues — immigration and public employee unions.
According to Kaus, the teachers’ unions have virtually destroyed the public school system in Los Angeles and throughout California, while amnesty without effective border control threatens the livelihoods of low-income wage earners in California and across the country — issues in which many Democrats, perhaps even a silent majority, might agree.
While those might be considered conservative positions, the contrarian blogger is one of the few Democrats in the country who has also called for a WPA-style jobs program — as a last resort — to stimulate the economy, employing thousands of jobless Americans in rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and in other useful public services.
That‘s a pretty liberal position, but that, too, could resonate in a state suffering from a staggering 12.6 percent unemployment rate with no relief in sight.
Kaus, whose long-shot candidacy is being run out of his second-story apartment in Venice Beach, has raised about $40,000 for his campaign so far, including a personal loan of $7,000. Of course, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the more than $15 million raised by Boxer — and that was before her campaign war chest received a $600,000 boost last week at a fundraising dinner featuring President Obama.
Despite his bare-bones campaign, the longtime blogger recently started airing 30-second radio spots in the Los Angeles and Bay Area media markets highlighting his proposal to rein in the public service employee unions that are “bankrupting this state” and urging Democrats to “seal the borders” before talking about amnesty for the 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
His candidacy also received a boost of sorts recently when the Los Angeles Times refused to endorse Boxer‘s bid for a fourth term.
Kaus’s critics claim that he really belongs in the GOP, that his positions on card check and immigration are out of step with a majority of Democrats.
But that’s the precisely the point of his candidacy, to demonstrate that the Democratic Party isn’t some sort of monolithic organization beholden to the public service unions whose pension costs have exploded, increasing by almost 2,000 percent over the last decade — nearly bankrupting the state in the process — while acquiescing to the powerful Latino voting bloc when it comes to controlling illegal immigration.
While the incumbent probably won’t lose any sleep over Kaus’s below-the-radar candidacy, don’t be surprised if the under-funded pundit-turned-politician polls a quarter of a million votes or more in the June 8 primary.
What do you think a quarter of a million votes would account for in terms of percentage?
That would be approximately ten percent of the vote based on a turnout similar to the 2006 primary, a year when Diane Feinstein faced two little-known challengers. Of course, California Democrats had a highly competitive gubernatorial race that year between Phil Angelides and Steve Westly, which helped to drive turnout.
Obviously I can’t speak for him, but I suspect that Mickey Kaus would consider his campaign a tremendous success if he somehow managed to approach the 15 percent mark achieved by novelist Gore Vidal during his widely-watched 1982 U.S. Senate primary race against Jerry Brown — a contest, incidentally, in which the affable writer, putting his literary genius on hold, finished a distant second in a field of nine.
Despite the financial backing of numerous Hollywood figures, including actors James Garner and Kirk Douglas, Vidal was badly outspent by Jerry Brown in that campaign. With less than a week remaining in that race, Vidal reportedly had only $68,942 cash on hand — barely enough for a limited television buy — compared to Brown’s war chest of more than $2 million, most of which he saved for the general election.
By contrast, Kaus has raised considerably less than Vidal. As of yesterday, the prolific blogger had raised about $35,000 from approximately 300 contributors.
I don’t know if Kaus can post a showing similar to that of Vidal in 1982, but it’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility given Boxer’s relatively low approval ratings and the generally anti-incumbent mood of a large portion of the electorate, including many rank-and-file Democrats.
Considering the overall mood of the country, I actually wouldn’t be totally shocked if he topped 15% or even 20%. Certainly worth watching, great article!