GOP thrives at local level in California
By Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times
OAKLEY — Randy Pope is a conservative-tinged libertarian with a strong aversion to big government and the nanny state he sees “growing, growing, growing.”
“I can’t choose which toilet I want to put in my house. I can’t choose which light bulb I want to illuminate my living room,” he says, ticking off the outrages on his meaty fingers. “I can’t choose which shower head I’m going to use when I’m bathing.”
Pope is a city councilman in this Democratic-leaning suburb on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and if that seems unusual given his rightward bent, he is not alone. Four of the five Oakley council members are registered Republicans, like Pope, elected the same day that voters overwhelmingly backed Democrats Jerry Brown and Barack Obama and approved Proposition 30, the state tax hike initiative.
Over the last two decades, California has become a Democratic fortress, beyond the GOP’s reach in presidential campaigns and all but hopeless in statewide contests. Republicans are largely irrelevant in Sacramento, where the most important fights are between liberal and more moderate Democrats.
Is California senile? You can learn a lot about a community by what they don’t talk about.
Democrats have driven California off a cliff and this article gets ignored. As does all this news just in the past week…
New estimates for the unfunded government employee retirement contracts in California are a staggering $640,000 billion dollars.
Siskiyou County has voted to secede from California and form a new state of Jefferson.
Obama has brought the country to the brink of War and the whole world is turning on us.. Plus the abuses by the IRS and EPA and Justice Department
…none of these important issues are even discussed here in SLT. You don’t find much in Sac Bee or the bay area papers either. It’s like a state of the senile …
CJ,
Have you ever checked out the market ticker forums? You are not alone.