Check out my story here about how the special election to replace Rep. Ellen Tauscher will cost cash-strapped Contra Costa County at least $850,000.

Given the severe budget crisis, is it time to let counties conduct mail-only elections especially for low turnout special elections?

Contra Costa Sheriff Warren Rupf

Contra Costa Sheriff Warren Rupf will not run for either the 10th or the 11th Congressional districts.

“The more I talked to people, the more I became convinced that I am not well-suited for partisan politics,” said Rupf, whose consultations included talks with national GOP officials in Washington, D.C. “The people that most want to talk you, on either side, are on the political fringes. They have a narrower view of what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it.”

Rupf said his values “don’t line up with the fringes of either party and compromising my values or my priorities is a price I am not willing to pay.”

The news will disappoint Republicans, who believed the well-known, outspoken and gregarious Rupf would have given Democrats in either district a serious challenge.

But Rupf faced considerable challenges of his own.

As a Republican, his chances of success at the ballot box were extremely slim in the heavily Democratic 10th Congressional District, just vacated by Ellen Tauscher.

Party registration is about dead even in the 11th District, but Rupf is largely unknown outside Contra Costa County except in law enforcement circles. More than half the 11th District’s voters live in San Joaquin County. He would also have had to run against an incumbent, Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, a task far more difficult than running for an open seat.

So, for now, the 10th District’s sole Republican in the race is political novice and attorney David Harmer of Dougherty Valley.

Several Republicans have declared in the 11th District, including San Joaquin County vintner Brad Goehring, David Bernal of San Ramon and Jon Del Arroz of Danville.

Brad Goehring

Native San Joaquin County farmer Brad Goehring will announce his candidacy Tuesday as a Republican candidate in the 2010 race for the 11th Congressional District.

Click here to visit his website.

Goehring has never held public office but given voters’ low opinion of Congress these days, that might not be a bad thing.

According to his biography, the resident of Clements and father of three is a member at large of the San Joaquin Farm Bureau and is a national expert on the federal Clean Water Act. I’m also told he was a college water-skiing champion.

His family has been farming in the area for four generations, which ought to give him some name identification in his home county although he is unknown elsewhere. San Joaquin County comprises about 55 percent of the district’s voters, while the balance are split among Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara counties. Party registration in the district is almost dead even between Republicans and Democrats.

He has hired Carl Fogliani, owner of Fogliani Strategies, as his campaign consultant. Fogliani was the campaign manager of the former Congressman Richard Pombo’s 2006 re-election campaign.

Goehring appears to be the first Republican — as of tomorrow — to officially declare his candidacy for the 2010 primary and set out on a path to potentially challenge Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, in the November 2010 general election. Goehring filed a his federal statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission on June 16.

Meanwhile, the web site of Republican David Bernal of San Ramon states that he has opened an exploratory committee for a possible 11th District run. Also, Republican leaders are courting Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren Rupf but he remains undecided.

Dean Andal, who ran unsuccessfully against McNerney in 2008, has said he will not run again.

UPDATE 3:48 PM: I just learned from Frank Aquila, president of South San Joaquin County Republicans, of another GOP declared candidate, Jon Del Arroz of Danville. Check out his web site at www.delarroz.com.
Click here to read his FEC statement of organization.

Read more for Goehring’s official press release:

Read the rest of this entry »

Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton

Two leading Republicans in San Joaquin County endorsed this morning Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney’s re-election bid.

San Joaquin Supervisors Steve Bestolarides and Larry Ruhstaller, both Republicans although the hold nonpartisan offices, cast their lot with McNerney before a single Republican has even declared interest in challenging the Democrat. (Republicans are courting Contra Costa Sheriff Warren Rupf but he has not made a decision.)

In the last election, Ruhstaller supported McNerney’s challenger, Dean Andal, with a $250 donation in 2007.

But the San Joaquin officials, in a prepared release, say their support has nothing to do with politics. They cited McNerney’s successful advocacy efforts related to the Veteran Administration’s recent selection of San Joaquin rather than Stanislaus County as the site of a new treatment facility.

No word on how the San Joaquin Republican Party or the National Republican Campaign Committee will view this pair’s announcement.

But Ruhstaller and Bestolarides, who served on local city councils prior to being elected to county seats, are in their first terms on the Board of Supervisors. This ought to be interesting.

Read on for the press release out of McNerney’s office and the two men’s comments: Read the rest of this entry »

A San Ramon area high school student Dong Seung Shin has won first place in the 11th Congressional District’s annual art competition with his painting, “Home of the San Francisco Crabs.”

Wow, this looks remarkably like how I feel every morning when the alarm goes off. But I digress.

The art contest in the district of Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, was held Saturday at the Grand Theatre Center for the Arts in Tracy.

“I am continually impressed by the talent and quality of work produced by all the students who enter the competition,” said McNerney in a prepared release. “I look forward to seeing Dong Seung Shin’s work every time I walk to the Capitol and showing it to visitors from the 11^th district.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced a robocall campaign in the district of Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton.

It’s part of the NRCC”s plan to target 43 members they view as vulnerable in the 2010 election.

McNerney’s district is slated for robocalls while the NRCC intends to spend in other states more bucks on television and radio ads.  (Click here to read The Hill’s Briefing Blog, which has a nice outline of the NRCC’s campaign.)

The automated calls criticize McNerney’s recent vote in favor of the federal budget and attempt to link him to the Republican’s arch nemesis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Of course, none of this angst will amount to much if the Republicans don’t find a viable opponent in District 11. So far, the field of potential challengers remains curiously blank. The 2008 Republican nominee, Dean Andal, dropped out of contention a few month ago.

Read on for the NRCC’s press release but keep in mind, the verbiage comes from an office where people are paid to spin: Read the rest of this entry »

Former newspaper political editor Adriel Hampton of Dublin announced his candidacy today as a progressive choice for the seat held by Rep. Ellen Tauscher, who has been nominated for an undersecretary’s post under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He’s also among the first candidate to announce his campaign via Twitter, according to Politico.com.

Hampton writes on his web page that he is “just a guy” but he’s a “guy with a dream.” If he is serious about running for Congress, he had better become a “guy with money.”

Hampton’s web site says:

Inspired by the community-focused revolution of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, today I am officially launching my campaign for California’s 10th Congressional District.

Many of you know me, but for those who don’t, I want to share a little of my background:

I was born in Modesto in 1978 and am a lifetime NorCal boy. I moved to El Cerrito in 1999, after graduating from Delta College, to attend Cal Berkeley. Around the time of my graduation in 2001, I moved to Walnut Creek, where I lived near downtown. Two years ago, I moved to our current home in Dublin.

My wife and I celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary next month, and have two children, 4 and 2. I’ve been a regular BART rider since moving to the Bay Area, and jump on each day to make it to my job as a municipal investigator for the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. I remember using BART to get from El Cerrito to Cal, and from Cal to my job as news editor of the Hayward Daily Review at the ANG News Center, sometimes barely catching the midnight line back home.

I am just a guy, but I am a guy with a dream. Read the rest of this entry »

Dean Andal

Republican Dean Andal will not challenge Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, to a rematch in 2010, instead opting for a job with mega-firm PricewaterhouseCoopers as a director focusing on California tax issues.

“It was a spirited campaign this last time around,” Andal said in an email release. “But Iʼve decided on a different path - one that still gives me an opportunity to stand up for California taxpayers. Although I enjoyed the time I spent with voters, this is the right decision for me and my family right now.”

Andal’s departure is both good and bad news for McNerney.

On the one hand, McNerney will not face a challenger who built up name recognition in the 2008 campaign and could, in theory, use that experience to take advantage of voter backlash against Democrats if the economy remains in the tank.

But it opens up the specter of an unknown Republican opponent whose strengths and weaknesses could be very different than those of Andal, a conservative with strong anti-tax record who nevertheless suffered from the anti-GOP sentiment that swept the country last November.

McNerney won the seat in a major upset in 2006, beating veteran Republican Richard Pombo. McNerney rode on the Barack Obama wave in 2008 and easily beat Andal last November.

It’s a safe bet that the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, which has already been running anti-McNerney ads in the district, either has someone in mind or they are rattling the bushes in search of a viable challenger.

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced this morning it will air a new radio ad attacking Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, for voting two weeks ago in favor of the economic stimulus package “chock full of wasteful Washington spending instead of working across the aisle to create real jobs for struggling middle-class families.”

Republicans remain embittered that the package doesn’t concentrate more on tax cuts than on infrastructure investments and other government spending to create new jobs; the package agreed to by House and Senate negotiators yesterday reportedly is about 35 percent tax cuts. McNerney is among Democrats the NRCC targets with such ads because they’re thought to be vulnerable to GOP challenge in the next election. (McNerney whupped Republican challenger Dean Andal by a 10-percentage-point margin last November despite a slight GOP voter-registration edge. But hey, whatever.)

“While middle-class families are hurting and looking to their leaders for help, Jerry McNerney has failed to deliver real relief,” NRCC Communications Director Ken Spain accuses in his news release. “Jerry McNerney had a choice to pass an alternative proposal that would have created twice as many jobs at half the cost and in less time, but he chose to pass this package of pork instead. After running on a platform of fiscal responsibility, Jerry McNerney now has the obligation to explain why he’s willing to pile even more mountains of debt onto our grandchildren without regard for how middle-class families’ hard-earned tax dollars will be spent.”

(Perhaps, in asserting how all this spending won’t stimulate the economy, the NRCC is forgetting the lesson of the Great Depression, which hit its worst point in 1933 — the year President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office and launched his New Deal — and then saw gross national product increase and unemployment decrease in each year after that. Or perhaps they’re forgetting that they soundly lost last November’s presidential and Congressional elections, indicating that their do-it-all-with-tax-cuts ideology isn’t ascendant right now. But hey, whatever.)

A quick snapshot of the need for help in McNerney’s 11th Congressional District. About 58.5 percent of the district lies in San Joaquin County, where the unemployment rate hit 13 percent in December (compared to 9.1 percent for California and 7.1 percent for the nation). The 34.8 percent of his district that lies in Contra Costa and Alameda counties fared somewhat better, with a 7.7 percent unemployment rate in December (though still on the rise). In other measures, San Joaquin County’s foreclosure rate is double that of California’s and more than five times the nation’s; the city of Stockton — of which McNerney’s district encompasses about 43 percent, making it the district’s largest municipal population center — still ranks among the nation’s top 10 metro areas for home foreclosures.

“There is no doubt that we’ve been hit hard by the tough economy,” McNerney said today. “I hear from many people who are worried about being laid off or losing their home to foreclosure. The economic recovery package is about getting people back to work. It will help stimulate the economy and create jobs by investing in education and transportation projects as well as providing tax relief to middle-class families. The economic recovery package should help create or save 3.5 million jobs nationwide and almost 9,000 jobs in my district. California’s families need these jobs.”

The NRCC said the ad will air as McNerney “heads to his district to face his constituents and try to explain why he voted for a trillion dollars in wasteful spending in the middle of an economic crisis.” Indeed, if you have criticism or praise for McNerney, go see him at his next “Congress at Your Corner” constituent meet-and-greet from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. next Saturday, Feb. 21 (NOT the day after tomorrow) at Big Apple Bagel, 4555 Hopyard Road, Suite 13, in Pleasanton.

UPDATE @ 2:03 P.M.: Here’s the ad…

Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, has reintroduced his water re-use, recycling and reclamation grant program legislation. He first proposed it in 2007 but it did not survive the rigors of congressional deliberation.

Click through on the right for the full press release. Read the rest of this entry »