Low-profile political vet in governor race
Until this week, former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin stood out as the only woman among the top candidates running to be California’s next governor. That changed when former top Hillary Clinton aide Amanda Renteria jumped into the race.
Eastin poked at Renteria’s lack of experience Thursday during an appearance at the University of San Francisco. Renteria may have been political director for Clinton’s losing 2016 presidential campaign and since April had been chief of operations for state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, but she’s never held political office. In 2014, she ran against GOP Rep. David Valadao of Hanford (Kings County) and lost badly, collecting only 42 percent of the vote.
While Eastin initially said “the more the merrier” Thursday when asked about Renteria announcing her candidacy, she said, “You can do a better job when you get your hands a little dirty” crafting public policy.
“I think it puts you at a disadvantage if you’ve never held public office in California,” Eastin said at USF as part of the university’s series of one-on-one interviews with the top gubernatorial candidates, co-sponsored by Politico and the school’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good.
“I acknowledge,” Eastin said, “that (Renteria) certainly has as much experience as one of the Republican candidates” — a reference to John Cox, a Rancho Santa Fe (San Diego County) businessman who is the only top candidate to never have held elective office.
Eastin said that while Cox frequently says he’s not a politician, “He’s run for public office five times. Go get your Webster’s dictionary out. We’ll see that it says a politician is someone who has held public office or run for public office. So if you’ve run five times, that’s more times than some of the others have run.”
Cox responded Thursday by saying, “If it wasn’t for special interest money, she’d be the leading Democrat, because she’s the most progressive.”
Eastin, meanwhile, is the only person running for governor who can boast that she’s been elected to local office (City Council in Union City), served in the state Legislature (Assembly) and held statewide office (superintendent of public instruction).
Yet she is badly trailing polling front-runners Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (23 percent) and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (21 percent) in the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California survey in January. In that survey, Eastin secured the support of only 4 percent of the voters, sixth among the seven candidates in the poll.
And her fundraising has lagged, too. While Newsom has $19.5 million cash on hand, Eastin has collected $658,000 in campaign contributions and has $183,843 cash on hand.
On Thursday, Eastin took on some other ethical issues that have shrouded the gubernatorial candidates in recent days, like whether the past sexual transgressions of Newsom, Villaraigosa and Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach (Orange County), should disqualify them from public office.
“I’m not sure it’s a disqualifier,” Eastin said. “We’ve had some pretty famous people who have sinned.” She was more concerned about taxpayers paying the legal fees of lawmakers accused of sexual misconduct.
“You all have to decide in your own hearts whether you think the character issue is something you’re comfortable with with each one of the candidates,” she said.
Asked whether Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County), a leader of the campaign to end sexual harassment in the state Capitol, should step down after Garcia herself was accused of sexual misconduct, Eastin said, “The kettle shouldn’t call the pot black.”