Carla Marinucci looks at a problem that is surely keeping the Democratic Party’s head honchos awake at night: party stars are getting older and older - and aren’t making room for the next generation of candidates. At SFGate:
“Some political observers suggest that a ‘gerontocracy’ dilemma looms for Democrats, who fired up millions of young voters with a fresh face named Barack Obama in 2008, but who now face the dominance of the party’s older officeholders and the difficulty of its younger generation in moving up the ladder.
“In what he called a post-election ‘wake-up call,’ Simon Rosenberg, who heads NDN, a Democratic think tank in Washington, warned his party last week that the Democratic National Committee must take the lead in ‘recruiting and training a new generation of candidates and operatives needed to beat a new generation of Republicans.’”
Former house Speaker John A. Pérez was appointed to the UC Board of Regents yesterday, as was Eloy Ortiz Oakley, president of Long Beach City College. From David Siders at the Sacramento Bee:
“’John and Eloy bring a wealth of experience and an extraordinary capacity to dig into the complexities of our great university system,’ [Jerry] Brown said in a prepared statement. ‘Their work has demonstrated a deep commitment to the students of California.’
“Pérez, 45, was described by Brown’s office as ‘a longtime advocate for affordable higher education,’ including championing a program to reduce fees for students from certain middle-income families. The Los Angeles lawmaker himself attended UC Berkeley but did not graduate. He ran unsuccessfully for state controller this year.”
George Skelton weighs in on UC tuition hikes, siding with Jerry Brown, Speaker Toni Atkins and new pro tem Kevin De Leon against UC prez Janette Napolitano. From yesterday’s column at the Los Angeles Times:
“Don't ask the kids and their families to sacrifice while fattening the pocketbooks of your own already highly compensated chancellors.
“That's not fair to people in the real world of stressed taxpayers and parents struggling to pay their kids' tuition.
“It's why the people's elected representatives — starting with the governor — are up in arms about the University of California's latest tone-deaf play to jack up some executives' pay while squeezing more money out of students.”
Scott Lewis at the Voice of San Diego filed part two of an investigation into the scandal-plagued campaign of Carl DeMaio, the San Diego Republican who narrowly lost his campaign for congress on November 4. The story is a fascinating look at the tech, tactics and personalities inside of a modern campaign, all centered around the emails at the heart of the scandal.
“DeMaio’s system even let unpaid interns ghostwrite messages in the candidate’s name. It let DeMaio ghostwrite messages in other people’s names. And it was a system DeMaio says a former staffer named Todd Bosnich abused. This is at the heart of DeMaio’s view on the scandal.
“In DeMaio’s story, you can never actually know when DeMaio is writing you or if it’s someone else pretending to be DeMaio. You also can’t know whether a message you’re receiving from a DeMaio supporter is actually DeMaio in disguise. What’s ironic is this is central to both his and his accuser’s story of what happened. A culture of open sharing of identities went awry.
“Both DeMaio and his accuser, Bosnich, claim that emails were sent under their names that were not actually their creations. Based on what I’ve been able to learn about this culture, both of their claims are entirely within the realm of possibility.”
And, if you just can’t get enough of political scandal, San Francisco Magazine’s Max Cherney has landed a series of exclusive jailhouse interviews with Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow. No Leland Yee scoops so far.
On the national front, WaPo’s Philip Bump digs into CNN’s Monday scoop about Republican groups setting up Twitter accounts to post coded internal polling results, skirting, if not breaking, laws against party coordination with outside spending groups.
“CNN has a scoop Monday morning that is a bit like a scene from some sci-fi movie in which a background radio report mentions unusual malfunctions in a new line of robots. ‘How the GOP used Twitter to stretch election laws,’ it is titled, which somewhat belies what's really happening: The barriers between campaigns and outside spending groups have short-circuited, and we may be looking at a complete uprising.
“According to CNN's Chris Moody, Republican groups set up at least two Twitter accounts that would periodically broadcast lightly coded messages about internal polling to the world at large….
“The follow-up list of poll numbers is probably a breakdown by ethnicity or gender, but it's hard to know which. That's perhaps the most important part of Moody's discovery. If it's impossible to translate the poll numbers without some special knowledge, that implies a level of coordination between campaigns and outside groups that moves this beyond a legal gray area and into a black one. Saying, ‘Hey, we put it on Twitter,’ (then mumbling to a secret account no one would ever see) is one thing. Saying, ‘We put it on Twitter in a way that required a decoder ring,’ is another thing altogether.”
And, yes, we have reached the end of civilization as we know it: The Oxford Dictionary has officially proclaimed “Vape” as the Word of the Year, beating out contenders like “bae,” “slactivism,” and “budtender” for the, uh, ‘honor.’
