Lipstick
The general environmental interest in the San Joaquin Valley is strong because it concerns basic health and safety issues. Anger is stirring in the public against rampant air pollution-producing development and the politicians who promote it.
In a recent article, Stockton Record political reporter Hank Shaw ended a look into the post-Pombo world with a quote from a professor:
"I am dubious that this will be a productive Congress," Pitney said. "I think there's going to be a lot of posturing."
If the professor's crystal ball is clear, and Shaw's interview with Pombo’s Ghost, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Merced, is any indication, we predict that Cardoza will rise in Congress like an untethered helium balloon.
But where will that balloon go, exactly?
The Congressional Progressive Caucus is almost twice as large as Cardoza’s Blue Dog Coalition. Other factors might spook Pombo’ s Ghost into striking aggressive postures. The CPC is led by two progressive congresswomen from the Bay Area. If that sounds familiar, it could be because the speaker-elect of the House and California's two US senators are also progressive women from the Bay Area.
Cardoza claims to be positioning himself in the political center.
Lipstick.
Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and congresswomen Nancy Pelosi, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee represent the center of the nation, which just voted the Republicans out because we the people are sick of this catastrophe of a war and corruption in Congress.
Cardoza told the Stockton Record he and the Blue Dogs are forming a coalition with a group of Republicans to influence policy.
This reminds me of a funny story that occurred one morning at a congressional breakfast held by former Rep. Gary Condit, Ceres. Condit was one of the founders of the Blue Dogs, a group of Boll Weevil congressmen that split from the Democrats when Newt Gingrich became the Republican speaker of the House.
Condit had invited Pelosi down to speak. She arrived with a friend, a small Hispanic woman in a neat city suit, whom she introduced only as "my friend, Dolores." She and her friend sat down at the head table with Condit and some lords of agribusiness and broke bread.
Meanwhile, a local Democrat with a living memory, a good camera and a sense of humor, took a number of pictures of the head table, Pelosi and Dolores chatting with the czars of wine, milk, and cotton.
As the event was breaking up, he offering the pictures to the great men who had been at the head table, suggesting that a picture of such-and-such a captain of agribusiness exchanging pleasantries over croissants with Dolores Huerta, the famous leader of the United Farm Workers, would look good on their boardroom walls.
The vignette could indicate how much influence Pombo's Ghost will have with the speaker.
State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, D-SF didn’t like the Valley any more than the Valley liked him. State Senate Pro Tem John Burton, D-SF, called UC Merced the biggest “boondoggle” he’d ever seen. They are long-time Pelosi political associates.
The Record reporter speculated that Cardoza might get a subcommittee chairmanship in the House Agriculture Committee that would permit him to advance the agenda of California's "specialty crops." It will be interesting to see if Pelosi will give it to Cardoza, after he was one of the five nominators of Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-MD, for majority leader, against Pelosi's choice, Rep. John Murtha, D-PA. Some might have suggested that if California's crops were so important to Cardoza, he should have kept his mouth shut.
It’s fun to imagine Cardoza in a panic, fearing the San Francisco women in power, rushing to the club of “real men in the center.” But, you can’t know that’s how it is happening. It could be that his special interest clients are dictating his every move and using their money in other venues to bring about advantageous results for themselves. After all, to them it is business, and they take business far more seriously than they take Cardoza. Pombo’s Ghost can pose as he wishes; meanwhile wine, dairy, cotton and development will make their deals where they think best. His aggressively Blue Dog strategy is a gamble. It may be a smart play or it may be a desperate leap. The nation moved politically to the left, so only time will tell.
Then comes the recent green paint job: starting with installing solar panels on his home roof (we wonder who paid for that), and talk about ethanol, etc.
"I'm just so committed to getting us out of the Middle East, with our dependence on foreign oil," he said. "We have to come up with alternatives."
While this sounds fruity and nutty enough for any wannabe chairman of a subcommittee on specialty crops, the nation prefers the direct approach of Pelosi, Lee, Woolsey and other mainstream Democrats: Get out of Iraq as soon as possible. Cardoza claims he is being “strong” posing in his imaginary middle, waiting until America is energy self-sufficient before ending imperial invasions of oil-rich countries.
More lipstick.
A powerful cabal of special interests in the northern San Joaquin Valley – Cardoza’s special interest clients – were able to arrange a free ride for him in this election. Residents of the 18th congressional district ought to ask themselves why a man as unpopular as Pombo’s Ghost represents them. Large landowners, developers, major agribusiness interests and the real estate financial and sales industries, along with UC Merced and the Great Valley Center, have ruled so absolutely that they think the region’s voters and the rest of the nation shared their agenda. In fact, even the voters of the district don’t share that agenda. For one glaring example, they thought the rest of the country hated the Endangered Species Act and loved developers, too. That isn’t even true in Cardoza’s district. So why is he representing the district? Did voters get sold a bill of goods here?
Rep. RichPAC Pombo, R-Tracy, was defeated because the opposition told the truth about him: he is corrupt, pro-Iraq War and radically anti-environmental. In the Sacramento area, Rep. John Doolittle, R-Roseville, crept back to Washington with less than 50 percent of the vote in his district, because the opposition told the truth about him: he is corrupt, pro-Iraq War and radically anti-environmental.
Cardoza is in the same pockets and, at least until a week or two, held the same views. His recent interviews with the regional press are lipstick. The intensity and quality of the collaboration and protection he enjoyed with Pombo can’t be replicated in this session of Congress, which will have a different agenda and some different faces, like Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, for example. McNerney and Cardoza belong to the same party in name only. McNerney, in two brutal races against Pombo, got no help from Cardoza at all. At least Pombo stood and eventually fell for something. Cardoza is now peddling the fiction that the gut-the-ESA bill he co-sponsored with Pombo was “too radical.”
Lipstick.
When Pombo lost, Cardoza -- corrupt, scared of the Iraq War and radically anti-environmental – lost a lot of influence he had with corrupt rightwingers. However, Pombo’s Ghost and a gang of old-time Boll Weevils and bitter Republicans could be strong and mean enough to block anything good for the people or their environment in the 18th congressional district and elsewhere. If they want him to represent them, rather than the same-old special interests that want low wages and resource-destroying urban sprawl, they are going to have to fight for it. Right now, Pombo’s Ghost looks totally bought-and-sold by a few people with no interest in the people of the district or their environment, public health or safety.
Bill Hatch
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Nov. 19, 2006
Stockton Record
Top Blue Dog looking to lead from the center
By Hank Shaw
SACRAMENTO - With Tracy Rep. Richard Pombo ousted, Rep. Dennis Cardoza of Merced has become the region's big dog in Congress.
Cardoza, a member of the new Democratic majority, is a leader of a conservative group of Democrats calling itself the Blue Dogs. Cardoza says he hopes the 44-member group can influence Congress from the center, much as he did as a member of the "Mod Squad" when he was an assemblyman in Sacramento.
Cardoza intends to lead the charge for California agriculture in next year's rewrite of the Farm Bill, a job left undone by the ousted Pombo. Like Pombo, Cardoza also wants to reform the Endangered Species Act, although not as radically as the Tracy Republican had wanted.
Cardoza's reach may extend beyond Pombo's by virtue of his position in the Blue Dogs, so named because they felt "choked blue" by what they saw as the dominant faction of their party's too-liberal ideology.
Newly expanded from 36 members to 44, the Blue Dogs were instrumental in getting Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, elected majority leader Thursday; Cardoza campaigned for Hoyer when Cardoza attended the University of Maryland in the early 1980s.
The group, whose focus centers on fiscal restraint in federal spending, is also expected to coordinate on budgetary matters with its Republican analog, the Tuesday Group. Combined, the two blocs represent 80 members of the 435-member House - enough to influence policy, if they stay united.
There's the rub: House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco is far more liberal than Cardoza or his colleagues, which include Rep. Ted Costa of Fresno and Ellen Tauscher of Alamo. And she has many like-minded colleagues: The Congressional Progressive Caucus has twice as many members as the Blue Dogs.
Cardoza says it will not be easy to drive policy, but then again, it was not when he and moderate Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg outmaneuvered their liberal colleagues from San Francisco and Los Angeles in Sacramento years ago.
"You have to be strong," Cardoza said. "Strong enough to stand up for what you believe in, because both sides will push you very hard. You have to be polite but immovable."
Chief among Cardoza's goals is a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance its budget; California and nearly every other state live under similar constraints, which forces lawmakers to live within their means.
Shorter-term moves will be to restore pay-as-you-go guidelines for federal spending, as well as rule changes making it tougher to increase the federal debt limit, insert parochial goodies into budget bills and hide votes on spending bills.
Nonfiscal goals include expanding incentives to study embryonic stem cells, a position the Blue Dogs and the Tuesday Group share with their progressive colleagues.
Personally, Cardoza wants to secure new incentives to open markets for California's "specialty crops," which in congressional parlance means everything except corn, soybeans, rice and wheat.
He may win himself a coveted spot in the Agriculture Committee as chairman of the subcommittee that oversees specialty crops. That determination is expected soon.
Cardoza also wants to craft a bill that would use federal tax receipts generated from fossil fuel production to expand renewable-energy research, such as solar, wind or biofuels. Cardoza just installed solar power at his home in Atwater.
"I'm just so committed to getting us out of the Middle East, with our dependence on foreign oil," he said. "We have to come up with alternatives."
One thing stands in Cardoza's and the Blue Dogs' path to influence: the assumption that the Democratic majority actually wants to get something done in the 110th Congress.
To do so, it must work closely with Republicans and President Bush or face filibusters in the Senate and a veto in the White House. Governing over the next two years must come from the center.
But governing is only one of the things Congress does. It also prepares itself for biannual elections, and 2008 is likely to be a humdinger. Several congressional seats won by Democrats this year are already being targeted by the GOP, including the 11th District won by Rep.-elect Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton.
And then there is the presidential election, which will be for an open seat with no heir apparent for the first time in a generation.
Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney said he expects Congress to bog down into dysfunction rapidly. He said it is far more likely that Democrats will be happier sending legislation for Bush to veto than to accommodate him and his fellow Republicans on matters of importance.
"I am dubious that this will be a productive Congress," Pitney said. "I think there's going to be a lot of posturing."
Contact Capitol Bureau Chief Hank Shaw at (916) 441-4078 or sacto@recordnet.com.