San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
State could hand Warren key to party’s nomination
For Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the road to the White House runs right through California and right over fellow Sens. Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders.
A win or even a strong showing by the Massachusetts senator in California’s 2020 primary, coupled with good results in Iowa and New Hampshire’s early-state contests, would vault the former college professor into the Democratic nomination contest’s top tier.
If Warren’s appearances around the Bay Area during last weekend’s California Democratic Party convention are any indication, she’s off to a good start on achieving her goal.
Warren bounded onto the convention stage at the Moscone Center on Saturday and shouted, “I’m Eliz
abeth Warren — and I have a plan!” The crowd went nuts, both with cheers and laughter.
The cheers were for her unabashedly progressive platform. The laughter was because Warren is becoming known as the wonk who has a policy paper for every issue.
It was the same act that drew cheers from a crowd of several thousand people on the soccer field at Laney College in Oakland the night before.
The plan has become the brand.
Warren’s stump speech is pretty much a greatest hits package of proposals that Sanders was touting in 2016. So one target for her is people who voted for the Vermont senator in 2016 but, for whatever reason, are looking around for someone new.
The other target is Harris, who polls show is far from a sure thing in her home state of California. That’s where the early states again come into play for Warren — she needs to do well herself, and she also needs Harris to flop and look less than viable when the voting starts in California.
Well played: Joe Biden’s decision to skip the San Francisco progressive party convention was a smart move.
The last thing Biden needed was to walk into a den of super-liberal lions. Look what happened last week when he flip-flopped on his longtime support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions. Then consider how much worse it would have been if Biden had been put on the spot at the convention.
There’s a lot of trouble ahead as Biden tries to adapt to today’s politics. Anything he can do to minimize the danger helps him.
He’s better off appearing before solid supporters in union halls where the ACLU hasn’t planted someone to ask a no-win question like whether prison inmates should be allowed to vote, as it’s done with other candidates.
The “D” is for Donald: President Trump actually gave a good D-Day anniversary speech, maybe the best I’ve heard since Ronald Reagan’s.
“To all our friends and partners, our cherished alliance was forged in the heat of battle, tested in the trials of war and proven in the blessings of peace. Our bond is unbreakable,” Trump said.
It was also clear from his lack of emphasis on key words and overemphasis on other words that it was the first time he had ever read the elegant statements.
Party play: State legislators were out in force at the California Democratic Convention. They were there to make sure labor organizer Rusty Hicks won the party chair fight over insurgent candidate Kimberly Ellis. The issue was money. Years ago, in the wake of campaign finance reform laws, John Burton basically turned the state party into a giant bank to funnel money into the campaigns of Democrats. Money that lawmakers raised — some of it from corporate sources that aren’t exactly beloved by Democratic activists — was deposited with the state Democratic Party. Then the party handed it out under its banner, with no trace back to the special interests that originally gave it.
Ellis was opposed to the corporate money. Hicks was more ... reasonable.
The lawmakers and their friends among the delegates turned out in force and soundly defeated Ellis and the “reformers.”
No-selfie zone: I found myself being escorted to a seat next to Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern at the Landsmen dinner at the Golden Gate Yacht Club the other night.
“I’ll take the seat, but only if there are no photographs,” I told the host. “Why no photos?” the host asked.
“If anyone sees me next to the sheriff, they’ll think I’m either snitching them out or on my way to jail. And neither is a good look.”