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Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado
Leave it to California, a state with a gaping $19 billion budget shortfall, to spend between $4 to $6 million in a special election only two weeks after the state’s June 8 primary.
Yesterday’s high stakes contest in the state’s sprawling 15th senatorial district — a badly gerrymandered Central Coast district that stretches through five counties from Santa Maria to San Jose — was held to fill the seat vacated by Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, the strawberry farmer-turned-politician and author of California‘s notorious Proposition 14, the recently approved “top-two” primary that was vigorously opposed by the state‘s political parties.
Maldonado, the son of immigrant farm workers, vacated his Senate seat in late April, 150 days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger named him as a successor to Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, a Democrat who was elected to Congress from California’s 10th congressional district in a special election in November 2009.
Both major parties and a number of special interest groups sunk at least $2 million into yesterday’s special primary election, which featured Republican Sam Blakeslee and Democrat John Laird, a former assemblyman from Santa Cruz. A Laird victory in yesterday’s primary would have given the Democrats 26 seats in the California Senate — one shy of a two-thirds majority needed to approve state budgets and levy tax increases.
The campaign was vigorously fought by both major-party candidates, with Laird desperately trying to link his Republican rival to the oil industry and telling voters that Blakeslee was eager to begin drilling off the California coast, conjuring up memories of the disastrous 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.
Absentee ballots could still put Blakeslee over the fifty percent threshold.
Blakeslee, a state legislator from San Luis Obispo, responded in kind, depicting his Democratic opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal responsible for the state’s mounting fiscal crisis.
“The issue I keep hearing over and over again is that people are concerned about one party having control of the legislature,” Blakeslee told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The Democrats control both bodies of the California legislature, holding a 25 to 14 majority in the State Senate and outnumbering the Republicans by more than twenty seats in the Assembly.
Two other candidates also campaigned for the vacant seat, the most serious effort being mounted by independent aspirant Jim Fitzgerald of San Luis Obispo, a mild-mannered former UPS account manager who scratched and clawed his way onto the ballot as Maldonado’s only opponent two years ago, collecting more than 13,533 valid signatures and garnering a whopping 131,229 votes, or 37 percent, against the popular incumbent.
Excluding absentee and provisional ballots, preliminary returns late last night gave Blakeslee 64,676 votes, or 49.7 percent — just shy of the fifty percent threshold to avoid an August 17 runoff — to Laird’s 53,639, or 41.2 percent. Blakeslee appeared to have carried San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Santa Clara counties while Santa Cruz and Monterey counties went for his Democratic opponent.
The 57-year-old Fitzgerald, who refused to accept individual campaign contributions in excess of $20, was polling 7,936 votes, or more than six percent of the vote last night.
Mark Hinkle, the newly-elected chair of the Libertarian National Committee, lagged far behind, polling 3,848 votes, or slightly less than three percent of the total.
Embarrassing showing for Mark Hinkle. The party shouldn’t allow their national chairman to run for office while serving as head of the party — it just looks bad.
Would people take Michael Steele seriously if he finished dead last in a State Senate race in Maryland?
Former oilman Sam Blakeslee and his allies outspent the Laird campaign by more than $1 million. That’s quite a reward for Blakeslee, who authored a bill to authorize new offshore oil drilling and used tax dollars to promote it. Get all the facts at http://www.blamesam.org.
it’s thorny but I’d raethr have access to Chekov et al in readable language than some awful translation. I remember reading a Primo Levi memoir – stunning and hard about Auschwitz – but the translation was distractingly bad.I heard Laird read at Cfairt. Underwhelming is right. He read with Sasha Dugdale and she was quiet, dignified and wonderful. I do feel Laird probably gets a lot of stick because of jealousy and who he’s married to etc. I admit I went to his reading out of curiosity raethr than love of his work.@Barbara: with my own work I have freedom. When translating others’ work I train to be more faithful to the intention of the original in word choice, the physical shape of the poem, reproducing rhymes etc etc.
That’s the smart thinking we could all benefit from.
What’s it take to become a sublime expounder of prose like yourself?